America's news TV channel for the Mideast fires its staff and goes off the air after funding cuts
CAIRO (AP) — The head of a U.S.-funded Arabic-language television and online news outlet that claims a 30 million-strong audience in the Middle East and North Africa terminated most staff and TV programming Saturday, accusing the Trump administration and Elon Musk of having 'irresponsibly and unlawfully' cut off funding.
In notices Al Hurra news staffers about their dismissals, chief Jeffrey Gedmin said he had given up on the U.S. administration's freeze lifting anytime soon for the congressionally approved money for Al Hurra and its U.S.-funded Arabic language sister organizations.
Gedmin accused Kari Lake, President Donald Trump's appointee to the American government agency overseeing Al Hurra, Voice of America and other U.S.-funded news programming abroad, of dodging his efforts to speak with her about the funding cutoff.
'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,' Gedmin said in severance letters obtained by The Associated Press and excerpted on the website of Al Hurra's parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Mohamed al-Sabagh, an Egyptian journalist working at the Al Hurra news website in Dubai, told the AP that all the staff in the website and the television channel received emails terminating their contracts.
Al-Hurra is the latest U.S. government-funded news outlet — after Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and others — to cut staff and services amid what the outlets say is the move by the Trump administration and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to withhold their congressional appropriations.
Lake, appointed to oversee the U.S. Agency for Global Media, describes her agency as being consumed by a 'giant rot' that requires the agency's destruction and rebuilding.
The U.S.-backed news organizations were set up starting in the Cold War between the West and Soviet Union. Their designated goal was to provide objective news about the United States and other subjects overseas, often to people under authoritarian governments without access to a free press.
The George W. Bush administration created Al Hurra in 2003, the same year his administration's invasion of Iraq overthrew that country's leader. Al Hurra's journalists covered the U.S. occupation and sectarian and extremist violence that followed, with some them dying on the job during the 2011 Arab Spring, and other political changes across the Middle East.
While Al Hurra over the years faced charges of bias from both conservatives and liberals in the United States, it was one of the few outlets in its region providing space for freedom of the press and speech.
In his note to staffers, Getmin said his organization would retain a couple of dozen staffers and a 'presence' online as court battles over the cuts play out in U.S. courts.
'It makes no sense," Gedmin wrote, 'to silence America's voice in the Middle East.'
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Knickmeyer reported from Washington.
Sam Magdy And Ellen Knickmeyer, The Associated Press
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