(CBS) America has been struggling with its image in the Middle East for decades but, after Iraq, Arab opinion plummeted. The Bush administration felt it had to act fast to explain America to the Arab world. So it began spending about $100 million a year on a U.S. government news channel in Arabic. It's called "Al Hurra," meaning "The Free One."
As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, Al Hurra's symbol is a herd of unbridled horses, and for American taxpayers it's been a wild ride.
60 Minutes has been looking into Al Hurra in a project with ProPublica, a new, non-profit news organization dedicated to investigative journalism. With so much at stake at Al Hurra, we were surprised to find what it's putting on the air. Some of it has supported terrorism and denied the Holocaust; insiders say Al Hurra has been undermined by loose financial and editorial controls, while its executives try to manage 24-hour news in a language most of them don't understand.
In 2004, as the president prepared to make his State of the Union Address, any Arabs who were watching were probably tuned in to popular Arabic news channels like Al Jazeera, which tend to devote airtime time to America's enemies. But on this night President Bush announced that the U.S. government was getting into the Arab news business.
Maybe it was an odd idea that news of the Middle East would be edited and broadcast from Springfield, Va. Al Hurra, the U.S. government news channel broadcast throughout the Middle East in Arabic, is headquartered there.
"We need an alternative voice in the Middle East. Whether Al Jazeera existed or not," says Jim Glassman, who until last week was the chairman of the government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice Of America, Radio Free Europe, and now Al Hurra television.
"Our idea with Al Hurra was to create a network to provide high quality, professional journalism with American standards. I think we've done that," Glassman says.
But people in the Middle East, including U.S. diplomats who speak Arabic, have been complaining about Al Hurra's "quality" and "professionalism."
The channel got off to a bad start in 2004. After Israel assassinated the founder of the militant group Hamas, Al Hurra stuck with a cooking show.
"They were doing a program on how to make salmon sandwiches for weddings. Well, how can you be credible if you don't cover one of the biggest stories of the day, in the Middle East?" asks Larry Register, a former CNN executive with 20 years of experience, who was brought in a-year-and-half ago to rescue the channel.
But Register says he found his staff of Arabs, imported from the region, divided along religious, ethnic and political lines. Asked what state the channel was in when he first walked in the Al Hurra newsroom, Register tells Pelley, "Dysfunctional, extremely dysfunctional."
"Words like militias were thrown around," he explains. "There was this militia that was in charge of this, and this militia in charge of that."
"It felt like you were living in the Middle East. It felt like somebody had picked up the Middle East and brought it to Springfield, Virginia, of all places," Register remembers.
When Register wanted to put on breaking news his first week, he says he found his staff was out to lunch, literally. "There was nobody there. The whole newsroom was empty," he remembers. "Everybody'd gone to lunch. So I'm asking, 'Well, what is this?' 'Well, they take three hour lunches in between programs.'"
Al Hurra's staff was mostly Lebanese Christian, which undermined its credibility in the broader, Islamic, Middle East.
Even worse, Register says he found Al Hurra was paying its vendors far more for services than well-run networks. "It infuriated me as a U.S. citizen to walk in there and seein' the money just flowin' out the door. A true waste of taxpayer money," he says.
Register cleaned house, firing people, renegotiating contracts, and trying to fulfill every news director's mandate. "Needed to get more viewers. Wanted higher viewer-ship across the pan-Arab world. We wanted to get a bigger audience," he explains.
How do you do that?
"I think you do that by becoming more credible. Covering more news aggressively," Register says.
Asked what being "more credible" means, Register tells Pelley, "Not just picking and choosing what you might want to cover because it's favorable for your side versus their side. Cover all of it. Tell the whole story. Part of the idea is Al Hurra is the free one. The name is 'The Free One.'"
But Register discovered Al Hurra had a conflict at its core: the U.S. government was all for free speech as long as it was in line with U.S. policy. The idea of "U.S. government news" blew up in Register's face when he aired a live speech by Hassan Nasrallah.
Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, is one of the most important political leaders in the region, but he's considered a terrorist by the U.S. government.
"You run that speech and a lot of people are watching it," Register says. "And every other Arab channel in the Middle East carried it. I think you look kind of un-credible if you don't cover it."
"This is a man considered a terrorist by the U.S. government, and you gave him an hour, live, on the air," Pelley remarks.
"Right. I considered it news. I considered it newsworthy," Register says.
Weeks later Register, okayed coverage of something more controversial, the so-called Holocaust deniers' conference in Iran. In that moment, the American Al Hurra sounded more like Al Jazeera.
According to the translation, the Al Hurra reporter said, "Despite the assurances of some of the participants that millions of Jews had in fact died during a German Holocaust, the group did not reinforce their statements with scientific evidence, but instead they were content to tell stories passed on to them by their ancestors."
"How does a reporter like that get on the air in an American newsroom?" Pelley asks.
"The quality of reporting when I got there was weak and poor. And that's how it happened," Register admits. "The person would do the story, send a script, send the piece, it would go to air. There weren't checks and balances to stop it from happening."
When it did happen, The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page called for Register's head; members of Congress said they would cut funding for the channel if Register remained.
Turned out "The Free One" had a bridle after all. Register resigned.
"One of the things we're not allowed to do is we're not allowed to provide a platform for terrorists," Jim Glassman says.
"The incident when Nasrallah was on the air for nearly an hour, live. That was a mistake?" Pelley asks.
"Right. It was a mistake. It was a violation of our guidelines," Glassman says.
But making sure that the guidelines are followed is tough because Al Hurra is not seen in the U.S. and no translation is provided to U.S. government overseers or the Congress.
"Was there anyone in management from the Board of Governors on down who spoke Arabic fluently who was monitoring what was on the broadcast day in and day out?" Pelley asks.
"No," Register says.
"The U.S. government is spending hundreds of million of dollars on this and we don’t know what's on this channel?" Pelley asks.
"Well the State Department has a team that watches it. But in the chain that you just mentioned, no fluent Arabic speakers," Register says.
Asked if that seems wise to him, Register says, "No."
Al Hurra's top executive is Brian Conniff, who does not speak Arabic. His new news director, Danny Nassif, does speak Arabic but has no TV experience and little journalism background. Conniff says that they are working together to prevent a repeat of some of the channel’s more embarrassing moments.
"We have now a fully functioning assignment desk that views all packages and scripts before they go on the air," Conniff says. "I have an independent monitoring system with the organization. I have somebody who watches the channel. Not, obviously, 24 hours a day, but on a random basis."
"You have somebody watching the channel for you?" Pelley asks.
"Yes, I do," Conniff says.
"Essentially, telling you what's on the channel?" Pelley asks,
"Yes. Yes," Conniff replies.
But we still found surprises on Al Hurra that slipped past the independent monitoring system. Last month, a guest on the show "Free Hour" was given free reign to rail against Israel.
"We were watching, a couple of weeks ago, the broadcast Free Hour. And one of the guests said that Israel's policies toward the Palestinians amounts to, in his words, a Holocaust conducted by a racist state. Were you aware of that?" Pelley asks.
"No. But, you know, I think it's a little unfair to pick a sentence out of an hour program - if the full context - balanced that, it's a different situation," Conniff says.
We checked and the speaker was neither challenged by the host, nor balanced by another guest.
"It's not necessarily just pulling a sentence out of a program. There's a pattern here, critics of this channel say. You have Nasrallah given an hour of air time. You have the Holocaust deniers conference covered. Now, you have this person saying that Israel is a
racist state. Is this the kind of thing the American taxpayer should be paying for?" Pelley asks.
"No. There's absolutely not a pattern," Conniff argues. "Now you're picking something that occurred, I don't know, two years ago, and…."
"Two weeks ago," Pelley points out.
"Two weeks ago. But that was, you know, a year and a half later. And you know, I not even gonna comment on that. I'll be happy to look into it, and see what the full context is," Conniff replies.
This week, Conniff told 60 Minutes that "any implication that Al Hurra is anti-Israeli is absolutely wrong."
So far U.S. taxpayers have spent nearly half a billion dollars on Al Hurra. After four years, we wanted to know if anyone is watching.
"I think by and large it's irrelevant," says Dr. Shibley Telhami, a top researcher of Arab public opinion.
He's a professor at the University of Maryland, and over the last six years he has conducted polls across the Middle East asking Arabs what they watch. He told Pelley that the channel the Bush administration loves to hate, Qatar-based Al Jazeera, is the runaway number one, with 53 percent of the audience.
Dr. Telhami says Al Hurra ranks toward the very bottom of that list. "I think in there, it takes about two percent," he explains.
"So, after half a billion dollars spent on Al Hurra, the effect in the region has been what?" Pelley asks.
"In terms of public opinion, less than zero," Telhami says.
Telhami says many in the Arab world say they dislike the United States because of its policies. It is not, he says, a misunderstanding or a distorted image portrayed by other channels. "It's what we do in Iraq. It's what we do on the Arab-Israeli issue. It's how we define our war on terrorism. Most people interpret it as a war on Islam," he says. "Every single year, anger with America has increased. Think about how could you get to that point if you're succeeding?"
It's important to note Telhami's polling does not include Iraq, which Al Hurra considers its biggest audience.
Jim Glassman told 60 Minutes that every week 26 million viewers watch some part of Al Hurra's programming. "We're not irrelevant," he says. "We're doing things that other broadcasters are not doing. We're doing thorough coverage, for example, of the elections in Morocco. We're talking about what's really going on in Egypt. We're talking about what's happening with women in the Middle East."
Compared to Al Jazeera, Al Hurra does feature more American and Israeli voices. It has extensive coverage of U.S. politics. Cultural programs, like an hour on blue jeans are among its most popular. But after nearly half a billion dollars, "The Free One" is seen by most Arabs as the U.S. government station, "The Cheney Channel" as some have called it, and that perception is limiting in a region where people tend to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"Did you wonder whether the United States government should be in the business of Arab news gathering?" Pelley asks Larry Register.
"I don't think any government should be involved in news gathering. 'Cause you can't make independent decisions if you have a government over you telling you what you can and can't do," he says.
"If it's credible you run afoul with the government. If you follow the line of the government, nobody watches it in the Middle East," Pelley remarks.
"It's a no-win situation, as I painfully found out," Register says.
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