Television diplomacy

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Joaquin Blaya believes that access to information will shape a different society in all corners of the globe.

Damian Reilly meets Joaquin Blaya, member of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors and a director of Alhurra television.

The Alhurra television channel is an American foreign policy tool, and Joaquin Blaya, one of four members of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors who oversee the channel, makes no bones about it.

"Yes, it is part of our public diplomacy. Alhurra today has a budget of $126m a year. We don't carry any advertising. We are subsidised by the American taxpayer. The American taxpayer is not paying for entertainment for people living in the Middle East. They are paying for the promotion of freedom and democracy, through news and information," he says.

Alhurra, for non-Arab readers unfamiliar with it, is a television channel that broadcasts mainly from America across 22 countries in the Middle East region. According to Blaya, it has a weekly audience of 27 million people, and is watched in, for example, 55 percent of Iraq homes, 55 percent of Syrian homes, 30 percent of Oman homes, and 27 percent of Moroccan homes.

Shaping the future

Blaya says he expects Alhurra will double its audience over the coming two years, and that doing so will influence the region's political culture.

"Our focus on the channel is mainly news and information, with pieces on women's rights, or ecology, or anything interesting. I believe that access to information will shape a different society. Now, this has only been happening in this part of the world for a relatively short period of time. What the results will be are yet to be seen."

Alhurra means ‘freedom' in Arabic. The channel, which is headquartered in Springfield, Virginia since it was founded in 2004, has a staff of about 200 people. Most of these people have been hired from rival broadcasters, although a lack of native Arab speakers at the highest levels of channel's staff has been the cause of some problems.

In May, 2007, Blaya was summoned to testify to a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The hearing was prompted by revelations that, on several occasions, Alhurra had broadcast messages against American interests, including "a 68-minute call to arms against Israelis by a senior figure of Hezbollah; deferential coverage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference; and a factually flawed piece on a splinter group of Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel."

According to ABC News, Blaya told the hearing that important decisions regarding Alhurra's output were being left in the hands of "reporters and producers who are hastily hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission."

The line between being on a ‘pro-Western mission' and being an American propaganda tool must be a fine one. Certainly, anyone with an intelligence quotient over 50 who watched America's Fox News during the most controversial days of the Bush administration would agree that ‘propaganda' and ‘news' are nouns that can become horribly muddled in the wrong hands. Blaya is quick to defend Alhurra against charges of propaganda dissemination.

"Look, you cannot just broadcast ‘there is a better way,' because that is propaganda. If you are just propaganda, then you have no credibility. None. The essential thing of international broadcasting is credibility. Giving people access to information is enough. I think with the new administration you will see that there is an even greater emphasis placed on this component of public diplomacy."

Blaya seems bemused at CEO Middle East's surprise that he is so open about Alhurra being part of America's foreign policy - that he does not even pretend the channel has an ulterior motive for existing. Now he fishes out of his pocket his Blackberry phone, all the better to address the issue.

Someone has sent him an email on this subject exactly, and he would like me to read it, all the better for my edification.

It's from a senator who attended a recent Foreign Relations Committee hearing. It says this: "The use of non-military soft power is potentially the most effective weapon in our foreign policy arsenal. We have seen what happens when we rely on sticks rather than carrots in our dealings abroad. We must continue to focus on winning hearts and minds.

It is not about selling America, but about cultivating understanding and long term relationships. For our strategy of making public diplomacy more effective, we have talked about finding ways to engage foreign publics, and provide them with the context for understanding our policy decision making and how we need better understanding of their opinions and potential reactions in order to communicate better with them."

Blaya is very proud of the work Alhurra is doing, and of the potential the medium of television has for changing societies. It was access to information that brought down the Iron Curtain, he believes: "I cannot predict the future, but access to information, well; you saw what it did behind the Iron Curtain. You could keep that curtain closed for so long, but it was access to information that brought the change. The impact of information is enormous.

"We want to see democracy spread throughout the world. We believe that through freedom of expression, education, societies around the world can change. We have seen this. For many decades we thought everything behind the Iron Curtain was a lost world. But all that changed."

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