U.S. Funded Al Hurra Looks For Good News In Iraq

With a yearly budget of over $40 million, Al Hurra, a U.S. supported TV channel for the "Arab World," is "one of the US government's most expensive public diplomacy efforts yet," reports MediaCorp News, a Singapore-based media group. Since its launch in February 2004, most news stories about the 24-hour Arabic-language satellite station report that the channel is viewed as little more than U.S. propaganda in the form of news and entertainment. Al Hurra's credibility as an independent news outlet is challenged by the German magazine Der Spiegel's report that the station's "50 staff members in Iraq have been instructed to be on the lookout for signs of improvement. 'If the power comes back on in a part of the city, we see this as being more newsworthy than reporting that the power is out someplace else,' says one employee."