LONDON: Last week, Victoria Coates was fired from her job as head of the US State Department-funded Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN) by the administration of US President Joe Biden, a role she had barely held two months.
Coates’ firing brings the long-troubled network to its third president in just over three years.
Former diplomat Alberto Fernandez took over from long-time head Brian Conniff in 2017 until June 2020, and was replaced with Kelley Sullivan until Coates’ arrival in December.
The revolving doors of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Voice of America and MBN’s top offices goes to show just how politically influenced the self-proclaimed objective and independent media enterprise, and MBN’s channels Alhurra, Alhurra-Iraq and Radio Sawa, really are.
What started off as the go-to network for aspiring journalists wanting to escape the political influence that dominated most newsrooms in the Arab world, slowly turned into just another such place.
Former Alhurra reporters spoke to Arab News anonymously about the heavy self-censorship the channels were subjected to by their reporters and producers regarding news that showed the US in a bad light.
They also spoke of the heavy pro-Israeli rhetoric that dominated their airwaves, despite their newsrooms being filled with Arab journalists — mostly from Lebanon and Palestine.
One reporter, who worked at the channel for over 12 years, notes that they were not even allowed to use the term “Nakba” on air — catastrophe in Arabic — which refers to the mass migration of Palestinians in 1948 following the Israeli occupation for fear it would frustrate its main funder, the US Congress.
Ironically though, with notable oversight into what was being aired, many of the program’s producers would insert their own views into the programming. Alhurra’s Iraq bureau would tailor content in favor of Iran-backed political parties that many of its staffers are members of.
MBN, whose news and radio channels Alhurra and Radio Sawa are Arabic for “The Free One” and “Together” respectively, was first unveiled by the Bush administration in 2004 to offer objective news free from political influence, and to improve the image of the US in the Arab world.
According to the network’s website, its mission is “to provide objective, accurate, and relevant news and information to the people of the Middle East about the region, the US and the world.”
However, the network has been consistently and continuously scrutinized for not upholding the standards former US President George W. Bush promised when he said the network would “cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda” found within the Middle East’s media landscape.
Alhurra attracted notoriety in the region over allegations of being a US mouthpiece, partly due to the fact that it is indirectly funded by Congress through the USAGM, which is an independent federal agency and MBN’s parent company.
“I have been following Alhurra’s channels for a few years now covering the Arab world and especially Syria. In my view, despite being based in the US where media is free and independent, they clearly reflect the opposite to Arab audiences, showing an explicit agenda bias to the US interest,” Syria-based journalist Ahmad Al-Hoare told Arab News, adding that “to a large extent, I believe that Alhurra networks are like any other government affiliated TV, radio or newspaper.”
MBNBIO
Middle East Broadcasting Network
Launched 2004
Headquarters: Springfield, VA; United States
TV & Radio: Alhurra, Alhurra Iraq, Radio Sawa
Online: alhurra.com. MaghrebVoices.com, IrfaaSawtak.
Parent company: United States Agency for Global Media
Another viewer, Norwegian-Syrian filmmaker Nizzar Al-Najjar, said: “While the US has always bragged, and accused the Middle East media for being a mouthpiece of their government, looking at Alhurra’s coverage in the Middle East, I realize from the first few minutes and on their website they are no different to any biased media platform.”
This was notoriously highlighted by Alhurra’s coverage of the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison-torture scandal during Bush’s second term.
Alhurra was the first Arabic news channel to air an interview in which Bush apologized to the Arab world, with many in the Middle East seeing that as a confirmation that the channel has a pro-US agenda.
The channel only broadcasts in the Middle East and North Africa, and not in the US where it is headquartered. Yet Bush’s decision to issue his first apology via Alhurra was unpopular with many US citizens — as well as many in the Arab world.
More recent controversies include President Donald Trump’s pick as USAGM CEO Michael Pack, who resigned less than a year into the job after he was told he would be removed by the incoming President Joe Biden.
Pack was accused of politicizing the agency in keeping with Trump’s demands, as he dissolved oversight boards structured to operate with editorial independence. Voice of America, MBN’s sister company, had its directors Robert Reilly and Elizabeth Robbins also removed.
“That Mr. Pack took this drastic measure in his first week on the job is shocking, and we have deep concerns that he takes the helm of a critical agency with the intent to prioritize the Trump administration’s political whims over protecting and promoting independent reporting, which is a pillar of freedom and democracy,” Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Nita Lowey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said at the time.
Apart from the Abu Ghraib debacle, the list of scandals remains long. Nonprofit news agency ProPublica published a damning report in 2008 that shed light on the tumultuous start of the network.
Victoria Coates was fired last week from her job as head of the US State Department-funded Middle East Broadcasting Network. (Supplied)
One of these was Alhurra reporter Ahmad Amin covering a Holocaust denier conference in Tehran, and making incendiary comments on air about Jewish people.
Another was the channel airing unedited footage of a US-designated terrorist Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s speech, in which he railed against the US and Israel, threatening the latter.
MBN relaunched its news outlets in Nov. 2018 in an attempt to introduce new programming across its platforms, with state-of-the-art studios based in Dubai. Nart Bouran, then-senior vice president of news, programming and transformation at the company, told Arab News then that Alhurra had the opportunity to “present proper media or journalistic values that others might claim (but) we will actually implement.”
Bouran left in Feb. 2020, and soon after, Pack was placed at the helm of USAGM, where the controversies soon returned to the network that just could not catch a break.
