A year ago Congress had to clean out Al Hurra's stables because their newsroom was having trouble distinguishing between "reporting" and "broadcasting hours and hours of unfiltered Hezbollah propaganda." The State Department's Arab TV station - modeled on the VOA because presumably the same historical values that appealed to Cold War Europe operate in the Middle East today - was also faulted for their fawning coverage of Iran's Holocaust Revisionism conference. Al Hurra director Larry Register had to resign before Congress would sign off on more Al Hurra funding. Luckily new director Brian Conniff has put a monitoring system in place:

American taxpayers are paying for a Middle Eastern television network that broadcast an anti-Israeli diatribe as recently as last month, a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and ProPublica reveals. This, despite the fact that Al Hurra management promised Congress nearly two years ago that they would take measures to prevent such mistakes, which had occurred repeatedly before. The joint investigation will be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday, June 22, at 7 p.m. ET/PT and be detailed on ProPublica's Web site simultaneously. Al Hurra is headquartered in Springfield, Va.; it was created four years ago by the Bush Administration to counter what was seen as an anti-American bias at Arab satellite news channels like the Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Nearly half a billion dollars has been spent since its inception and its top executive, Brian Conniff, assures Scott Pelley things have improved editorially. "We now have a fully functioning assignment desk that views all packages and scripts... I have an independent monitoring system..."

But 60 Minutes and ProPublica monitored the broadcast last month and found a Palestinian guest named Hani El-Masri on its flagship show "Free Hour" calling Israel a "racist" state that is conducting its own "Holocaust" against Palestinians. His exact quote, unchallenged by the host or balanced by another panel member, was "[Israel] is the occupying and racist state that imposes the stifling and deadly blockade and perpetrates a holocaust against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza."... Soon afterward, irate members of Congress were assured that Ahmed Amin would be fired. ProPublica and 60 Minutes have learned that, 18 months later, he was still on the U.S. government payroll. He was fired only after 60 Minutes and ProPublica began inquiring. The news director of Al Hurra who made the decisions to cover both the conference and Hezbollah speech was forced to resign. In his first interview since this controversy, Larry Register defends his decisions, telling Pelley he was trying to make Al Hurra more credible and relevant to people in the Middle East, where, according to a public opinion pollster, it gets just two percent of the audience.

In fairness to Register, Conniff, and the rest of the Al Hurra staff, they really are in an impossible situation. State Department department public diplomacy operates under the principle that Islamist supporters of jihadism will like us more if they only understood us better. It's the left's obsession with framing carried over into government-to-people rather than party-to-people communication. Never considered: the possibility that the US's enemies might hate us not because they don't know about America but because they understand US values all too well.

So Register's spineless excuse for using US dollars for Hezbollah propaganda and Holocaust denial is at least half right: it's functionally impossible to build a credible Middle East media presence without wallowing in the same insane conspiracy theories that dominate the rest of Arab public discourse. What I'm a fuzzy on is why this is supposed to be an argument in favor of Al Hurra continuing to fund Al Hurra.

References:
* US Public Diplomacy TV News Chief Quits Over Al-Hurra's Striking Resemblance To Al-Jazeera [MR]
* This Is Why Public Diplomacy Will Fail - Islamists Take It Over And Use It For Propaganda [MR]
* U.S.-Funded Arab TV Channel Slams Israel [CBS News]

Previously:
* Public Diplomacy Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry
* Karen Hughes - Public Diplomacy Chief, Utter Failure - Finally Resigns [Video]
* MR Reacts to Bloggers' Conference Call With Israeli Ambassador Uri Lubrani - Public Diplomacy Probably Won't Work, and Counting On It Is Probably a Bad Idea