‘Mistakes’ Made in Screening Anti-Israel Speech
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WASHINGTON — Overseers of the American government’s Arabic-language satellite television network say a speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, was not screened for anti-Israel content before broadcast because no supervisor spoke Arabic.
“Mistakes were made,” Joaquin Blaya of the Broadcasting Board of Governors told the House Middle East subcommittee yesterday, referring to the broadcast last December and others by the network, Al-Hurra, that he said “lacked journalistic or academic merit.”
The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat of New York, said that in several instances Sheik Nasrallah used the American government’s satellite television network as a platform for inciting a crowd to violence against Israel. In another Al-Hurra broadcast, Mr. Ackerman said, a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyah, lent support to the Iranian assertion that the World War II Holocaust against European Jews was a myth.
“Why are American taxpayer dollars used to spread the hate, lies, and propaganda of these nuts, when our goal was to counter them?” Mr. Ackerman asked.
Focusing especially on the Nasrallah speech, Mr. Ackerman said the Hezbollah leader spoke for more than 30 minutes live on the American network inciting violence against Israel. “Doesn’t anybody watch the broadcasts?” he asked. “I can only conclude, based on the trend of the last few months, that Al-Hurra’s news executives have decided that pandering is the way to greater audience share,” Mr. Ackerman said.
Mr. Blaya, fellow board members D. Jeffrey Hirschberg and Brian Conniff, the head of Al-Hurra’s Mideast broadcasting department, called the incidents intolerable and due largely to an absence of Arabic-speaking supervisors. “With these program errors standing as painful indicators of the need for additional controls, we are moving forward to shore up our management structure,” Mr. Blaya said.
A new vice president for news, Larry Register, has been appointed, and editors are now accountable for monitoring news items before and while they are delivered. Mr. Hirschberg said he knew of no recurrences of a few anti-Semitic incidents. “The Broadcasting Board of Governors promotes freedom and democracy,” he said.
Rep. Howard Berman, a Democrat, said of the broadcast: “At some level for some people this was not a mistake. It was intentional.”
