The government board that oversees the US-funded Arabic satellite channel Alhurra has refused to make public an independent study commissioned last year to review the network’s content.

People who have read the study, which was completed in July, described it as highly critical of Alhurra, a four-year-old government broadcasting effort begun by President Bush that has cost U.S. taxpayers $500 million and has been shrouded in controversy.

 

Bush’s public diplomacy efforts have been widely criticized by Democrats and even within his own party and corners of his administration. It is likely that his successor will review some of the most expensive efforts such as Alhurra which was designed to promote a positive image of U.S. policies in the Muslim world.

 

Democrats and Republicans were irked this past summer when they discovered that Alhurra was draining funds from key Voice of America broadcasts to countries such as Russia and Georgia. The Bush administration had planned to cut broadcasting services to both of those countries. But when they fell into a military conflict in August, Senate Democrats recommended restoring funds for those broadcasts at the expense of budget increases for Alhurra.

 

Alhurra was the subject of a joint investigation by ProPublica and CBS’ 60 Minutes in June that uncovered serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and deep concerns inside the U.S. government about Alhurra's content.

Those stories led to a Congressional inquiry by staff members of the House Foreign Affairs committee.

 

So far, House committee staff has interviewed Alhurra’s president, Brian Conniff, BBG board member Joaquin Blaya and BBG executive director Jeffrey Trimble. Tish King, the spokeswoman for the BBG, said the agency would have no comment on Blaya or Trimble’s appearances before committee staff.

The State Department’s Inspector-General has also begun an investigation into the financial dealings of Alhurra’s parent company; the government owned Middle East Broadcasting Network, known as MBN. Several of the investigators involved in that inquiry have also been interviewed by Congressional staff.

Lynn Weil, a senior Democratic staff member of the committee said the Congressional inquiry is the result of "disturbing questions raised by the reporting of ProPublica and 60 Minutes and to some extent the Washington Post and we’re trying to follow up on that."

David Adams, the staff director for the House subcommittee on the Middle East, said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Gary Ackermann (D-NY), hopes to hold hearings on Alhurra.

Both Alhurra and MBN are overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors which regulates all U.S. government broadcasting overseas, including the Voice of America.

Last year, the BBG set aside $182,000 of public money to pay for a review of Alhurra by the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy. The study was commissioned after a series of Congressional hearings in May 2007 spotlighted commentaries on the network deemed anti-Semitic as well as violations of Alhurra’s broadcasting code which forbid interviews with individuals identified by the U.S. government as "terrorists."

 

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