The new CEO of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks tells NR the network needs to be overhauled.

Wasef Eriqat had a message for Alhurra viewers when he appeared as an on-air military expert to discuss the war in Gaza in early December 2023: Israel, according to Eriqat, was not engaged in a legitimate military action. Rather, the Israelis were engaged in a genocide, targeting women and children instead of confronting Hamas fighters.

Eriqat’s December 3 appearance on the U.S. taxpayer-funded network came about a month after the former general with the Palestinian Liberation Organization — which the U.S. has long designated as a terrorist group — declared the October 7 terrorist attack a “heroic military miracle come true,” according to a report in the Jewish Chronicle.

Eriqat has also publicly accused President Joe Biden of being an “accomplice to the genocidal war,” and denied that Hamas terrorists targeted Israeli civilians on October 7 or that they use their own civilians as human shields, according to the Chronicle.

Since November 2023, Eriqat has appeared at least five times on Alhurra, a U.S.-backed broadcaster established more than two decades ago to counter anti-American bias rampant in Middle Eastern media and to accurately represent the U.S. and its policies.

And he’s not the only supporter of terror to appear on Alhurra as an analyst or expert.

Samir Ragheb, a former Egyptian army general who called October 7 a “new military miracle by all criteria” on Facebook, has been on the network or quoted as an expert at least four times since October 2023. Similarly, Ismat Mansour has been featured as a political analyst or Israeli affairs expert on Alhurra’s website at least nine times since March. Mansour was convicted as a teenager of killing a Jewish man in a 1993 terror attack and is now a researcher with the Institute for Palestinian Studies.

The men’s appearances on Alhurra have been tracked by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, a pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, which calls out anti-Israel and antisemitic content in outlets worldwide.

In addition to what it views as problematic Alhurra guests, CAMERA says the network has continuously used anti-Israel language that appears to run afoul of the U.S. government’s guidance, including incorrectly referring to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital and calling the Golan Heights “Syrian” or “occupied.” The U.S. has recognized the territory as Israel’s since 2019.

Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s president, told National Review in an email that Alhurra is falling short of the higher standards expected of a taxpayer-funded broadcaster.

“Alhurra’s habit of featuring anti-Israel analysts without being clear about their biases — and using loaded language at odds with U.S. policy — is a serious problem,” she said. “It raises real doubts about whether they’re staying true to their mission.”

The issues that CAMERA has raised about Alhurra’s broadcasts are in line with issues the organization has raised about coverage in more than 200 other media outlets over the years. But while the problems at Alhurra may not be particularly unusual, Alhurra’s response to CAMERA’s concerns seems to be.

When reached for comment by National Review, Jeffrey Gedmin, the new president and CEO of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, or MBN, which includes Alhurra, didn’t dispute CAMERA’s allegations. Instead, he called them “disturbing.”

“I think the concerns are legitimate,” he said.

Gedmin didn’t make excuses. Alhurra, he said, shouldn’t be in the business of platforming terrorists or terrorism supports as cloaked experts or analysts. “It’s awful,” he said. “There’s no two ways about it.” He also acknowledged that Alhurra has made mistakes with its language choices, saying the network handled the issue “clumsily and ineloquently.”

But Gedmin wasn’t necessarily surprised to learn about troubles with Alhurra’s coverage.

In interviews and email correspondence with National Review, Gedmin — a former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a one-time scholar with the center-right American Enterprise Institute — described being recruited last spring to right the “badly broken” ship that is MBN. When he arrived, he said, he found a dysfunctional organization with serious deficits in leadership, management, and accountability.

“Through the course of a half a dozen years, it turned out that they didn’t have an editor in chief, they didn’t have a standards editor, they didn’t have bureau chiefs, they didn’t have a director of the newsroom. How in the world did that happen? I don’t think it was anybody’s conscious bad decision,” Gedmin said. “I think it’s partly neglect, maybe a bit of malpractice — I can’t judge. But boy did it snowball.”

Levin said newsroom leaders are often “defensive and reluctant” to address her organization’s criticism and concerns. She called Gedmin’s response “encouraging.”

“As the saying goes, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” she said. “To his credit, Mr. Gedmin has taken that first important step. However, the serious issues at Alhurra remain, and addressing them will require consistent effort and a commitment to developing better practices.”

Bloated and Dysfunctional

Although not well known in the U.S., Alhurra was established in 2004, in the early years of the War on Terror, to counter the anti-American bias that plagues Arab media in the Middle East and northern Africa. It is part of the non-profit, taxpayer-funded MBN, and under the larger umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which also includes Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

When Gedmin joined, MBN had about a $100 million budget. MBN’s stated mission includes expanding the spectrum of ideas and perspectives in the Middle East and accurately representing “America, Americans, and American policies.” The U.S. Agency for Global Media’s broadcasting standards and principles include being “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”

But MBN and Alhurra have at times struggled with their mission. In 2007, a Wall Street Journal columnist penned a series of columns accusing Alhurra’s leaders of driving out liberal voices, airing live speeches by terrorists, and providing airtime to guests who vilified Israel and spun antisemitic conspiracy theories. A 2008 Inspector General’s report found that Alhurra corrected those problems and took “significant steps to tighten its procedures and policies in order to protect the credibility that is critical to fulfilling its mission.”

Gedmin said that last spring he was recruited to help fix MBN by Ryan Crocker, the former ambassador to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Pakistan, who also serves on the network’s board. Gedmin said he was flattered and agreed to the task, but he was surprised at what he found when he arrived at MBN’s Springfield, Va., headquarters.

The network, he said, had churned through six presidents in as many years, whipsawing employees who had developed a culture of “exceptional caution; kind of, keep our heads down, keep our heads down” because they didn’t know what leader was coming next.

Gedmin said he’d “never seen such poor morale and dysfunction across a company, honestly, in my life.”

While MBN had “tremendous talent, expertise, [and] experience,” he said, it had become a “bloated and underperforming organization without accountability — or purpose.”

After he’d been on the job for a couple of weeks, Gedmin reached out to Crocker; turning the network around, he told Crocker, would likely be a three-to-five-year project.

Crocker agrees that MBN is broken, driven by what he described to National Review as “just enormous turbulence at the top.” The development of an overly-cautious culture over the years has resulted in generally colorless journalism and a default to regional norms.

But the organization is “definitely fixable,” Crocker said.

“My overall sense is that the organization right now is less than the sum of its parts, in the sense that, I think there is a lot of real talent and commitment there that has not been all that well developed and managed,” Crocker said.

“There’s a lot to be done,” said Crocker, who praised Gedmin as an executive with a “sterling track record” in government-funded media. “He knows what he’s doing.”

Gedmin began over the summer, firing four senior executives and a half-dozen mid-level managers. He took a bigger swing in the fall, dismissing 200 employees, a workforce reduction of about 25 percent, and shaving $20 million from the budget in the process.

Some of the people he let go were underperformers, he said, while others had behavioral problems, including men who treated their female employees poorly. But Gedmin insists he found very little evidence of journalistic “mal intent,” though he noted “it may be there.”

After serving as MBN’s interim head for six months, Gedmin was named the network’s official president and CEO in late October.

“Bit by bit by bit, we’re trying to rebuild a company that is sensible, rational, and editorially sound and responsible,” Gedmin said, while acknowledging they still have a long way to go.

“We are still weak editorially,” he said, “and we are still weak on oversight and accountability and controls.”

Problematic Language and Guests

In mid-January 2024, a few months after the October 7 attack and a few months before Gedmin arrived, CAMERA reached out to Alhurra leaders via email with a list of 25 requested corrections to what it deemed “problematic terminology.”

At least 18 times since October 7, Alhurra had referred to Israeli communities targeted by Hamas as “settlements,” a term CAMERA says suggests that the towns and villages are illegitimate, even though they are located within Israel’s internationally-recognized borders.

In another seven cases, Alhurra incorrectly referred to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital, even though it is not, and the U.S. under then-president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital in 2017.

Alhurra made the corrections, as they did when CAMERA identified similar errors in 2020 and 2022. But Alhurra’s lawyer did not respond when asked to elaborate on measures the network would take to prevent the errors from occurring, given that they’d been repetitive.

And the use of problematic language continued. Alhurra referred to Israeli communities as “settlements” another 29 times last year, according to CAMERA’s review, and the network used Tel Aviv as shorthand for Israel’s capital or seat of government another ten times.

CAMERA also found 39 examples since the October 2023 of Alhurra referring to the Golan Heights as “Syrian” or “occupied.” The U.S. officially recognized the territory as Israel’s in 2019, though no other countries do.

CAMERA has also identified examples of what it says is Alhurra incorrectly identifying the entire Temple Mount compound as the al-Aqsa Mosque, and referring to a building that Israel attacked in Damascus in April as an Iranian consulate, even though Israel disputes that and the U.S. government has not clearly acknowledged it as such.

Gedmin said Alhurra appears to have simply repeated language from other sources which referred to the building as a consulate without really thinking through the choice of language on their own. He called it “kind of a case study in a lack of rigor.”

“We’re reporting it as if it were fact, the Iranian position,” he said.

Crocker suggested that the Israeli attack on the Damascus facility could have been an opportunity for Alhurra to add some key context. “As a survivor of the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, brought to us by the Iranians, among others, I would have like to have seen that injected into the coverage,” he said. “If diplomatic courtesies have been violated, well, the Iranians kind of wrote the book on that.”

In addition to the problems with loaded language, CAMERA also identified at least 15 instances when either terrorists or terrorism supporters were invited on Alhurra’s broadcasts to weigh in as experts or analysts.

Wasef Eriqat, the former PLO general, was on Alhurra at least five times between November 2023 and May 2024. However, he seems to have saved his most egregious commentary for other outlets, including BBC Arabic. “He’s very aware that whatever he says in an Egyptian channel he cannot say on the BBC, and whatever he says on the BBC he cannot say on Alhurra,” a CAMERA spokesman said.

In addition to praising the October 7 attack as a “military miracle,” Samir Ragheb, the former Egyptian general whose been featured by Alhurra as an expert at least four times, called October 2023 the “month of victory,” according to translations of his Facebook post. Even before October 7, he had a history antisemitic social media posts, including calling the 1973 Yom Kippur War “the war against the Jews,” and saying that the 1982 return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt was an act of purifying it “from the filth of the Jews.”

Alhurra has also featured Ismat Mansour at least nine times since March as a political analyst or Israel expert. Mansour is a researcher with the Institute for Palestinian Studies specializing in Israeli affairs, but before that he served more than two decades in an Israeli prison for killing a Jewish man in a 1993 terrorist attack. Mansour and three other teens kidnapped the man, a religious student, stabbed him to death, and tried to burn his body to hide the evidence, according to news reports.

Israel released Mansour in 2013 as a gesture to facilitate peace talks. After he was out of prison, Mansour said he did not regret killing the civilian, whom he considered a “settler” who was “on my land.” He told the Washington Post in 2014 that Israelis whose loved ones are killed by terrorists should “not take it personally.”

Translations of the stories on Alhurra’s website featuring Mansour do not appear to note his history of terrorism or his conviction.

Levin said CAMERA is not calling for Alhurra to blacklist guests. But, she said, Alhurra “owes it to their audience” to confront guests about their past statements and actions.

“In this case, I think CAMERA is too kind,” Gedmin said.

He said he has a different view about putting former terrorists and terror supporters on the network: “They shouldn’t be our guests. There are a thousand experts. I’m sorry, we are U.S. funded. We are not a propaganda outlet, but we have a value set, and we actually have a point of view.”

A Newsroom Transformation

In the coming weeks, months, and years, Gedmin said he aims to establish explainable policies, editorial guidelines, and a newsroom leadership structure to better ensure oversight and accountability. He’s already reached out to CAMERA and proposed a virtual huddle every couple of months to discuss any concerns.

“I want to have a conversation with them. I want to listen and learn from them. It shouldn’t be defensive, it shouldn’t be adversarial,” he said.

Levin said training may be needed “especially for reporters and editors who’ve worked in Arabic outlets where biased language is common.”

Gedmin agreed there’s something to that. By and large, he said, his Middle Eastern staffers agree that Iran is an enemy, Israel is not an enemy, the U.S. is an ally, and Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists. But they come from a variety of countries, “have a mix of quirky attitudes,” and most haven’t been marinated in a journalistic culture like the U.S.’s, he said.

“I’ve got a Palestinian working for me. His parents have lost their home, they’re living in a tent on the beach,” Gedmin said, sighing. “It’s hard. So, standards, compass, American foreign policy objectives, oversight, accountability.”

Gedmin’s bigger mission over the coming years is to turn Alhurra into a leaner, more nimble, and digitally-focused news organization that can better serve as a counterweight to disinformation from China, Russia, and Iran. He also aims to beat their Arabic-language competitors, particularly Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, with a higher level of enterprise and investigative reporting.

“We can beat them and advance American interests and values. And I think in three to five years, we’re definitely in that game,” he said, adding that he intends to stick around and stop MBN’s six-year leadership merry-go-round.

“Honestly,” he said, “I find it very gratifying working on hard things, and, if you will, pushing rocks up a hill. It’s kind of nice to push them down the ill, but that’s not as gratifying because anybody can do that.”

Despite Alhurra’s problems, CAMERA leaders agree that it is still more balanced than most Arabic-speaking outlets, including outlets funded by Western governments.

Levin said she’s happy that Gedmin is now taking CAMERA’s concerns and critiques seriously, but she said a big question remains: “Can one capable leader enact the structural changes needed to transform the newsroom?”

“Restoring solid journalistic standards, including presenting a full, accurate portrayal of the contentious Palestinian-Israeli conflict, will require editors and reporters who share his vision,” Levin said. “It will also likely demand greater viewpoint diversity within the staff, including Middle Eastern minorities such as Arabic-speaking Jews, Christians, and Muslims who support the Abraham Accords and Israel’s existence.”

“Without such a newsroom culture,” she continued, “even a leader like Mr. Gedmin may find it very challenging to achieve tangible success.”