In U.S. retreat from global media, Arab language network is latest casualty

Yahoo

03-05-2025

The message was contrite but direct. 'I'm heartbroken. If you're receiving this letter, I'm letting you go — effective immediately.'
The email came from Jeffrey Gedmin, head of Middle East Broadcasting Networks,or MBN, the nonprofit overseeing the U.S.-government-funded, Arab-language news channel Alhurra.
It was April 12, and the email in the inbox of 500 of Alhurra's employees was another move by the Trump administration and its Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to shut down U.S.-funded media initiatives abroad. Alhurra, which received around $112 million in 2024 from Congress, joined other state-supported outlets, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which had their funding frozen.
Done in DOGE's chainsaw-signature style, the cuts have disrupted the lives of journalists both in Alhurra's Middle Eastern bureaus and its Virginia headquarters, leaving them with no severance or compensation. Dozens who had permits to work in the U.S. are unsure if they can remain in America.
When news about Alhurra filtered out — along with talk that even MBN might shut down — many observers saw it as an own goal, a misguided rollback of U.S. soft power in the Middle East.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, which is helping MBN with legal representation to restore its funding, called the cutbacks "a betrayal of the U.S.'s historical commitment to press freedom."
In a statement, Gedmin said, 'Media in the Middle East thrive on a diet of anti-Americanism. It makes no sense to kill MBN as a sensible alternative and open the field to American adversaries and Islamic extremists.'
But interviews with critics — including many from Alhurra and MBN's own ranks — reveal a more complicated story.
Though many insist they believe in MBN's mission to bring a pro-American perspective to the region, few mourn it in its current form. Others say Alhurra withered under an unclear mandate that never allowed the channel to find its identity and therefore audiences.
Some even agreed with Kari Lake, the pugnacious advisor Trump appointed to oversee the Agency for Global Media, which provides funding for news programming abroad. Lake recently described her new workplace as 'irretrievably broken,' where 'waste, fraud and abuse run rampant.'
'It was a relief to me when the grant was canceled because I didn't want my taxes, as little as they are, contributing to somebody's six-figure income that sucks in their work,' said a former employee who was involved in reviewing MBN's finances and who left last May. 'We didn't have to scratch very deep. We were finding things that were very disturbing."
Like many interviewed for this article, the former employee refused to have his name used to avoid reprisals. He accused MBN management of entering into needless, multimillion-dollar expansions of bureaus that went wildly over budget, all amid a culture of cronyism that often left the wrong people in place for too long.
The April firings continued a downsizing that began in September, when Congress mandated a $20-million cut to MBN's budget, forcing management to fire 160 employees and merge Alhurra with its Iraq-focused satellite news channel, Alhurra Iraq. In March, though Congress had approved MBN's budget through the end of the 2025 fiscal year, Lake blocked the disbursement to MBN a few hours later.
'I'm left to conclude that she is deliberately starving us of the money we need to pay you, our dedicated and hard-working staff,' he said in the email. Along with Alhurra, MBN supports other news outlets.
Rather than shut down and declare bankruptcy, Gedmin decided to keep Alhurra on-air with a truncated schedule — mostly broadcasting evergreen content and reruns — and a skeleton staff of 30 to 50 people. It was a gamble, Gedmin said in an interview this week, that would 'buy time for the courts.'
'If we win this in court and eventually have funding, we would pay some severance and restore some staff,' Gedmin said.
Read more: Trump signs executive order directing federal funding cuts to PBS and NPR
Susan Baumel, a former interview producer at MBN, said in an article published on the National Press Club website last month she and her colleagues were fired before the courts decided if the Trump administration acted legally, unlike staff at other U.S.-funded outlets which were put on leave.
(On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the administration to release $12 million it had cut from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The administration, he ruled, could not unilaterally revoke funding approved by Congress.)
An email sent in March from a former employee in the finance department to top management which was reviewed by The Times said MBN had $8 million in its accounts, including $4.7 million that could have been used to cover unused annual leave and partial severance. The employee also wonders why some bureaus continued to operate despite loss of funding. By April, according to a WhatsApp conservation between former employees reviewed by The Times, the balance had fallen to $4.2 million.
MBN leadership, including Gedmin and the MBN board chair, former Ambassador Ryan Crocker, insist the networks will pay annual leave and end-of-service to all employees terminated last month.
Many of those laid off resent the decision to continue broadcasting, saying Gedmin knew Lake was unwilling to deal with current management, and that he and his colleagues should have stepped down weeks earlier.
'I consider that the money they used to continue [operating] was supposed to be for us, and we were neglected and our professional life destroyed so they could keep on broadcasting,' said one correspondent who worked in the Beirut bureau for six years. 'We weren't given a safe exit, to have one or two months to search for a new job. We were thrown out on the street — that's how I see it.'
Another correspondent who worked with Alhurra Iraq since 2008 characterized the firings differently.
MBN managers "basically took us as hostages so they could face the Trump administration,' he said.
Meanwhile, around 40 Alhurra employees in the U.S. on work visas must leave the country before May 12. All U.S.-based staff lost healthcare benefits at the end of April.
When President George W. Bush began Alhurra in 2004, he said it would "cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda" and act as a counterweight to what U.S. officials considered the pernicious coverage of Al Jazeera.
But launched one year after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, it faced an uphill battle.
"It was tainted, in the first place, as the mouthpiece of the American administration, placed before audiences that are already skeptical of political affiliations of any media,' said Zahera Harb, an expert on Arab media at City University in London.
'The idea you can win hearts and minds through propaganda and information by telling people how good the U.S. is — it was never going to work,' said Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and an Arab polling data expert.
'It was not a main source of news," said Telhami, who served on a Bush-era commission evaluating Alhurra's performance. "Our research showed that less than 2% of people watched it. And that's probably charitable.'
MBN claims Alhurra and its other outlets reach a combined 33.5 million people per week, but a 2023 study from the University of San Diego's Center for Public Diplomacy found that it never exceeded 27 million weekly views for the last decade.
The same study found Alhurra's share of adult Arab audiences shrank by half, from 17% in 2005 to 8.8% in 2022.
At the same time, complaints of corruption have long dogged the network. A 2009 ProPublica investigation found much of the hiring based on cronyism and office politics rather than on qualifications — a scenario all former employees interviewed for this article say still persists.
Alhurra is subject to the same forces afflicting all TV networks, with audiences increasingly finding their news on TikTok and YouTube. But even during big news events, including the war in Gaza, Alhurra live broadcasts never managed more than 167 viewers, said one former employee in the Dubai bureau.
'And 100 of those screens are people inside our studios. So who is really watching you, 20, 25 people?' she said. 'And that's probably the censors.'
Read more: Between censorship and chaos: Syrian artists wary of new regime
Gedmin, who became interim head of MBN last April and took the reins in October, acknowledges MBN's defects, but said he believed the networks were on the path to a turnaround before Lake's intervention.
None of the former employees interviewed had faith MBN's current leadership could improve.
Others question the very premise of a government-funded channel being independent.
James O'Shea, who served as chairman of MBN's board between 2022 until 2024, said, "One of the things I walked away with is I don't know if you can do this with government.'
O'Shea, a former editor of The Times, remembered how at one news meeting, Alhurra journalists were chastised for talking to Hamas representatives, because such interviews drew the ire of congressional officials.
'You can't ignore a major part of the story. Alhurra was set up to be independent, but it wasn't,' he said. He added that the 'tragedy' of Alhurra was that 'an Arabic-language news operation, with an objective, journalistic voice is really needed in the region.'
"The best thing you can do is promote the American kind of journalism: Not controlled by any government, and which adheres to the principles of the 1st Amendment."
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.