Ackerman on the Spot

All eyes will be on Congressman Gary Ackerman today when he convenes a hearing of the Middle East subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The topic will be what in blazes is going on at the Alhurra television network that American taxpayers are funding. Potentially the network is one of the most potent of weapons in our arsenal in the global war against Islamist terror. It operates in a theater where our interests are under attack constantly by such private broadcasters as Al-Jazeera and by various state broadcast and print operations. But it has been riddled with problems, some having to do with the kinds of things that happen with any startup operation and others having to do with editorial judgment.

Among Alhurra's blunders has been a broadcast of Hezbollah's leading ideologist of anti-Jewish terror, Sheik Nasrallah. Alhurra kept him on the air — live, no less — for more than an hour, a stunt that some members of Congress recently charged, in a letter to Secretary Rice, violated a written policy. The congressmen quoted a report in the Wall Street Journal that quoted Sheik Nasrallah, five minutes into his rant on Alhurrah, as saying "the only place where bullets should be is the chest of the enemies of Lebanon: the Israeli enemy." The congressmen also cited a bizarre broadcast that gave credence to Iran's Holocaust denial conference. This has lead to calls in the Congress and in the press (particularly eloquently in dispatches by Joel Mowbray issued by the Wall Street Journal) for greater oversight.

These columns are not so inexperienced that we fall over in a faint at the first signs of trouble on an international broadcasting agency. Those of us who covered the Cold War up close well remember the feuding that went on at the Radios — we speak of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — and also of the shocking views of some of the staff members there and some of the shocking things that occasionally got onto the air. But we haven't the slightest doubt that, on a net basis, the Radios rank for a significant share of the portion of honor that comes with the American victory in the Cold War. Abraham Foxman reminded us yesterday that the Jewish defense organizations supported the creation of a broadcasting arm in the Middle East theater. When we reached him on the phone, he was in Israel, where, he reminded us, it was possible to hear Sheik Nasrallah's tirades even on Israel's state-owned airwaves.

But the situation at Alhurra demands a hard look by Mr. Ackerman and his colleagues. The members of Congress who wrote Ms. Rice reckon the problem is with the editorial management of Larry Register, Alhurra's news director. They seek his removal. But there's a deeper problem. How did he get hired and who within the Broadcasting Board of Governors is running the show. What we would like to see is a battle-tested, ideologically savvy broadcast chairman, someone who has enough time in grade that he or she won't flip out at the first blunder but will be an experienced operator in the ideological wars. A person, say, who has lead Voice of America and edited the world's largest magazine (Readers Digest). Someone precisely like that, Kenneth Tomlinson, is the current chairman, but the Democrats have spent the past few years curbing his power and he's getting ready to leave. President Bush has named a worthy successor in James Glassman. By our lights the burden is on Mr. Ackerman and his colleagues to back up the BBG's chairman as we go into the next phase of the struggle to bring an honest report to the Middle East.