Gee, nobody in Iraq wants to watch U.S. propaganda

So the new marvelous "independent news" station run by the CIA isn't much of a success. And apparently the military is actually considering dropping the funding.

To get back to work at the Iraqi Media Network's Al Iraqiya radio and television station, run by a California-based multinational named Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC*), Hameed has to walk through a maze of barbed wire, concrete barricades and three body searches run by the Florida National Guard and ISI, a private Iraqi security company.

...At the final checkpoint outside the entrance to the corridor of offices that houses Al Iraqiya's offices, she passes a television that is almost always tuned to either Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya, the popular Middle Eastern satellite channels that are their main rivals.

In the streets of Basra and Baghdad we ask people if they watch Al Iraqiya and the answer is almost invariably no. What is most surprising is that we get the same answer from people who hate Saddam Hussein and support the Americans, almost everybody gets their news from Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya.

"Al Iraqiya has no news. Just yesterday's information," is the common refrain. Chagrined reporters at the Al Iraqiya agree because of strict rules that ban them from reporting material that might incite violence.  article

Obviously Iraqis are not yet consumerized into Faux Snoozers.

The manager of the station has a different outlook:

"I am not in competition with Al Jazeera, let them do whatever they want to do. In fact most Iraqis don't have satellite dishes. Those that do found the remote control to be a new toy. Now they are returning to us because they trust us to tell the truth. Freedom has to be exercised with responsibility and we will not allow Saddam Hussein to use this as a platform," he says.

Well, he is an Iraqi-American from Ann Arbor, and in the pay of the U.S. government, so I guess it's quite possible that he was trained to speak at the same place they trained the head churl, His Slowliness the Dope and Oaf of Office.

And catch that bit about the satellite dishes. It reminds me of that email that came around stating all the good things that happened since "the end of major combat operations". The long list reported the availability of statellite dishes no less than three times. Obviously satellite dishes are a major concern.

Don North, a correspondent in Vietnam, Washington and the Middle East for ABC and NBC News, called Al Iraqiya "Project Frustration" when he quit in July.

"IMN has become an irrelevant mouthpiece for CPA propaganda, managed news and mediocre programs"....North says that a $500 request for a satellite dish to downlink the Reuters news feed was refused and a $200 request for printing a training manual that he put together in Arabic for reporters was turned down.

North was not the only senior staffer to quit. The first news director, Ahmad Al Rikaby, proudly told Baghdad Bulletin: "I opened my eyes to a family who were fighting Saddam Hussein and became part of this fight -- I always wanted to speak freely in Iraq but never had a chance to do so. The project of creating free media in Iraq is an honor, a dream." But he too resigned when the CPA re-hired staff troublemakers or Baathists (Saddam Hussein's political party) that he had fired.

Meanwhile those reporters who stayed on were ordered to cover daily CPA news conferences, interviews and photo opportunities while being paid the equivalent of $120 a month, leading to major strikes by the reporters.


*SAIC:

SAIC's biggest source of income is surveillance especially for the United States spy agencies: it is reportedly the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

...SAIC has dozens of other government contracts: it trains air marshals for the Federal Aviation Administration, works with Bechtel to run the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada on Western Shoshone traditional lands (despite major protests from the Native Americans), The Army hired the company to destroy old chemical weapons at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the National Cancer Institute uses SAIC to help run its research facility in Frederick, the Transportation Security Administration asked it to dispose of scissors and pocket knives confiscated from air travelers and SAIC's unmanned Vigilante helicopters, equipped with Raytheon's low-cost, precision-kill rockets, are to undergo testing by the Army.