Saturday, February 14, 2004
Here's some money well-spent as a start on the path to winning hearts and minds. The US has finally gotten around to launching its own Arabic satellite channel. While Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and the trunk-loads of state-run and sanctioned Arab TV stations have been murdering us for years, we'll finally have our own voice operating 24 hours a day. Let's hope they get the right people in there to do a good job with it. It's as important - maybe more important - than bullets and bombs. Will it solve all our problems overnight? Will people start tuning in and thinking, in their millions, "Wow, I never thought about it that way!" No. But some will, and it's a start. It's all about offering choices, and having a choice available for those who are seeking. In the grand marketplace of ideas, you can't win if you don't play. It's about time we did. Marketing and communications are America's strengths. We should start flexing.
Haaretz: Washington begins TV broadcasts to Arab countries
Al-Hurra, or The Free One, began broadcasting with a short videotape showing windows being opened - a signal of freedom.
The station's first item was a news briefing that began with Saturday's guerrilla attack on an Iraqi police station west of Baghdad in which 21 people were killed.
In the interview, Bush said he was optimistic about the future of Iraq and said Iraqis were taking serious steps toward achieving democracy.
"We have not been in Iraq for one year and already there has been enormous progress. Among the things I find important is that people have started to talk about achieving democracy. If these voices had appeared last year or the year before... their voices might have ceased to exist," he said, according to an Arabic voice-over translation...
Update: Omar at Iraq the Model saw the first day's broadcast. He liked it so far.
Update2: Saw a report on FOX News. It looked sharp. In fact, it looked (visually - there's no way to know anything about the content) like FOX.
