Augean Stables

Joel Mowbray has a particularly illuminating column on why the US Government funded Arabic station Alhurra has turned into another al Jazeera. And this, despite its own claims:

Alhurra (Arabic for “The Free One”) is a commercial-free Arabic language satellite television network for the Middle East devoted primarily to news and information.

In exploring what’s wrong, he enters deep into the Augean Stables of MSM prejudice and arrogance. In realizing the problem, we may begin to ask ourselves what needs to be done before our media can give us a clear idea of what’s going on in the Middle East.

Register’s Last Hurrah?
Our taxpayer financed Arabic network was set up to counter Al-Jazeera, not echo it.
By JOEL MOWBRAY
June 4, 2007; Page A17

To understand the challenge faced by Al-Hurra, the U.S. taxpayer-financed Arabic TV network, consider the case of Yasser Thabet. For years, Mr. Thabet has been a leading figure in shaping news coverage in the region. Whereas fawning over terrorists would be career suicide in the United States, Mr. Thabet, formerly a broadcast editor at Al-Jazeera, did just that — and promptly landed a top position at a major Arab media outlet.

Last summer, Mr. Thabet wrote a loving tribute on his personal web site to Soha Bechara, a woman who attempted to assassinate a general of the main anti-Hezbollah forces, the South Lebanese Army. Calling her “a living symbol of Lebanese resistance,” he encouraged “those who are unfairly and unjustly detained in our Arab World” to take solace from her example, including Tayssir Allouni, the former Al-Jazeera reporter who was convicted by a Spanish court in 2005 of passing money between al Qaeda and an affiliated cell in Spain.

After the execution of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Thabet unleashed a vitriolic attack on Iraqi Shiites, whom he called “a group of murderers.” Lamenting that “the execution of Saddam was a political and historical mistake,” Mr. Thabet wrote fondly about how the “corpse” of Saddam had managed “to incite its people to retaliate and resist.”

I’m not sure what the rest of his work looks like, but based on this, it seems fair to me to suggest that he’s — at best — what we call an “advocacy journalist.” Now this is par for the course in the Arab world, where the media are subject to the culture of honor-shame and political expediency that (in part) accounts for and contributes to that region’s miserable economic, cultural, and political record. One can only with difficulty understand the immense gap that separates what passes for journalistic “truth” in Arabic news media, and what we mean by the same word. Here, for example, a PATV official explains why he inserted a shot of an Israeli soldier taking aim and firing, taken on a different day (later) into the footage of al Durah so that it looked like the soldier shot the boy in cold blood. It’s a “higher truth” and “we never forget our journalistic commitment to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

A few months later, in March of this year, Mr. Thabet was hired as chief editor of news by Al-Hurra. His employment is just one of a number of recent controversies surrounding the network since the appointment of longtime CNN producer Larry Register as its news director last November.

Now why would a Western journalist in charge of an American station hire such a man? More on Register below, but broadly speaking for the same reason that one NPR official explained to me why they put someone like Saeb Erakat on the same show opposite Tom Segev: “it’s slim pickings out there.” Slim indeed. Of course, the listening public would never know it. On the contrary, the whole MSM performance is aimed at giving the opposite impression.

Internal Al-Hurra memos and emails show that Mr. Register was directly responsible for most of the broadcasts — which provided platforms to Holocaust deniers and Islamic terrorists — that have angered lawmakers. The network’s oversight panel and the U.S. State Department have nevertheless maintained that the news director’s actions on these matters were just “mistakes.” But when Mr. Register hired Mr. Thabet, he knew exactly what he was getting.

Mr. Thabet was well-known as part of a relatively small group at Al-Jazeera who decided to broadcast Osama bin Laden’s propaganda videos unedited. He publicly defended that decision in 2004 at a speech at the University of Delaware, saying simply, “It’s important to hear [bin Laden’s] opinions.” He told a Colorado audience that same year that because some terror arrests were aided by the videos, Americans should be grateful they were broadcast.

Of course, just passing the videos on to the authorities might have had the same results. But this gets to the larger problem of terrorists and the media. They crave the attention. We need news. How to decide?

Given his track record, it is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate job candidate for Al-Hurra. The Broadcasting Board of Governors — the Congressionally-created panel charged with overseeing international broadcasters — apparently agreed. The BBG learned about Mr. Thabet’s past shortly before a Congressional hearing on May 16 that focused on Al-Hurra’s new direction. By week’s end, Mr. Thabet was fired.

Nevertheless, Mr. Register’s hire of Mr. Thabet has apparently not shaken the BBG’s confidence in him. As part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to save his job, Mr. Register’s backers, including members of the BBG, have largely based their defense on his record at CNN, where he ran the Jerusalem bureau from 1989-1992. Mr. Register’s supporters claim that he was well-liked in Israel and had a reputation for being balanced.

Those claims do not sit well with some of Mr. Register’s former colleagues, who say he was known as someone who harbored deep biases against the Jewish state, and that he often bragged about his close relationships with, among others, former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. A half-dozen of Mr. Register’s former CNN colleagues who agreed to be interviewed for this column share largely similar recollections of his tenure there. Their statements about Mr. Register’s sympathetic attitude toward dictators in the Middle East and elsewhere are also corroborated by independent evidence, including emails written by Mr. Register himself. (Mr. Register has declined more than five requests for an interview between February and last week — the latest rebuff coming despite the appearance of two articles about him by me in The Wall Street Journal (a March 12 column, and a May 1 column).

Inside of Mr. Register’s current Al-Hurra office, say several Al-Hurra employees who have seen them, there are on display two photos of him with political figures. One is with the very noncontroversial Queen Noor of Jordan; the other is with the Syrian despot, President Bashar al-Assad. “Having a photo with al-Assad signaled to the entire newsroom where his sympathies lie,” one Al-Hurra insider said.

While he was CNN’s vice-president of special projects, a producer suggested that CNN “may not be balanced in terms of the kind of coverage we’re providing” by failing to do human interest stories on the suffering of Israelis. Mr. Register responded, in an email on May 1, 2001, that “balance is difficult in this story because it is a completely out of balance story.” In his five-paragraph note, Mr. Register wrote that “99% of the Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel as their neighbor.” This claim is startling; repeated polling throughout early 2001 found strong majority support by Palestinians for suicide bombings.

This is a nice illustration of the PCP cognitive egocentric projection of good faith onto the Palestinians, on the one hand, and the kind of deranged notion of balance that prevailed in the early period of the Oslo Intifada, on the other. Note that Register’s faith statement — grotesquely contradicted by the sight of Palestinians dancing in the street at the news of a successful “martyrdom” operation — carries with it a clear implicit flip side: if 99% of Palestinians want peace and there’s still war, then we know who wants that war.

I may be projecting, but I strongly suspect that the image of Muhammad al Durah weighed heavily in the mind of Mr. Register when, in mid-2001, he made this remark about “completely out of balance…” That and the outrageous differential in casualty rates that marked the reporting of an MSM now completely credulous of “Palestinian Sources,” which, as Sophia recently pointed out, is morally dubious at best. It does, however, make telempathic sense. Having been shocked over the voyeuristic experience of watching poor Muhammad die on screen, observers became completely inured to reports of Israeli infants shot by Palestinian snipers (no need to insert footage in these tales).

Echoing a longtime Palestinian Liberation Organization argument that attacks against Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza aren’t actually terrorism, Mr. Register also wrote that “[Settlers] do live under daily threat . . . but this is the life they choose . . . not the one they have to live.”

Oh that the media might have taken that attitude towards the “humiliating checkpoints” and closures that the Palestinians brought on themselves with their violence.

Mr. Register added, “In Israel proper it would not be responsible to do a story of Israelis living under daily threats of violence.” This was “because it is not the daily reality.”

That would have been news to Israelis, who at the time of Mr. Register’s email had already been subject to a dozen recent terrorist attacks dotting the landscape in “Israel proper” from northern Israel to the Tel-Aviv area to Jerusalem. In all, 19 had been killed in those attacks, and over 300 injured.

The radical inconsistency of Register’s remarks, his complete disregard for any evidence that contradicted his PCP “Israeli Goliath, Palestinian David” framework, illustrates sharply the kind of irrational impact that events in the early years of the century had on our news media. Western audiences could not hope to get a remotely accurate picture of what was going on then, if the highest figures in the business not only thought these things, but believed them so firmly that they did not hesitate to assert them so aggressively — for him it was obvious that this was “a completely out of balance story.”

Mr. Register still seems to be toeing the PLO party line. Last Month, on May 15, Al-Hurra’s onscreen ticker referred to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as “al Naqba,” which in Arabic means “the Catastrophe.” When Mr. Register was informed of this — that in effect Al-Hurra was taking a pro-Palestinian position absolutely not shared by the U.S. government that funds the network — he said to employees in the newsroom that it was appropriate, since it’s the term used by Arabs. The ticker was eventually changed, but only after an hour had passed.

I don’t know if I’d call this the PLO party line so much as the “Palestinian suffering narrative.” It is one of the more catastrophic phenomena of our day that, for reasons all their own, the “progressive” left has discounted the Israeli national narrative — land without a people for a people without a land, making the desert bloom, defending valiantly against an onslaught of bloodthirsty armies, not responsible for refugee flight — completely, and adopted the Palestinian narrative of victimization and demonization with as much credulity as they treat the Israeli narrative with skepticism. The results of this mythologization of the past are especially noxious to the Palestinians, who believe their own stories partly because the Westerners affirm them.

So Register, by plastering his Arab sympathies on the US Arabic station, turns one small possibility of an oasis of reality in a desert of fantasy into yet one more desert waste. When you seek to curry favor with people who (secretly) have no respect for themselves, you do not gain their respect by adopting the loud and false narrative that they shout to hide their shame.

Mr. Register has assured Congress that he is committed to fair coverage of Israel. Yet those assurances should be considered alongside his view of the Feb. 9 riots that occurred just outside the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Despite widespread agreement in the Western media that the riots were started by Muslims, Mr. Register was convinced that Israel was the instigator — and he was determined to catch the Jewish state in the act the following Friday. He wrote an email to Al-Hurra staff saying that he wanted a satellite truck “in place to get people turned away from prayers . . . if the Israelis do this again.”

Muslim men under 45 had been turned away from the mosque on Feb. 9 — in order to limit the scope of violent riots that Palestinians had already hinted were coming. But so too were Jews, praying at the nearby Western Wall, removed from the area.

This week, the House panel responsible for funding the State Department and all international broadcasters takes up its fiscal year 2008 spending bill. Nine of the 13 members of the Appropriations subcommittee on Foreign Operations have already demanded that Mr. Register’s employment be terminated, and now they have an opportunity to hand State and the BBG an ultimatum.

So Mr. Register’s defenders should ask themselves: Is it worth risking millions to save someone with so dubious a track record?

That’s the least of it. Is it worth keeping someone who, no matter what his own perception of what he’s doing, turns unploughed yet fertile soil into desert waste rather than rich harvests? What an opportunity for the US to address the Arab world with something serious, for which individual Arabs, disgusted with their own cultures “dream palaces,” scan the world’s media for those who will give them a small glimpse of empirical reality. Where are all those voices so eager to “speak truth to power” when it comes to talking back to bullies?