...With an annual budget now over $70 million, Al-Hurra has for three years served as the centerpiece of America's aggressive post-9/11 courtship of the Arab world. Insiders maintain that the network was fulfilling its mission until it hired former CNN producer Larry Register last November. Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra's dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been "gutted," in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses. (Mr. Register did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

It is precisely because of Arab society's persistent refusal to accept the existence of such a defining--and indisputable--event in modern history that Al-Hurra dared to do things Al-Jazeera would never fathom, such as interviewing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and airing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But that was under Mr. Register's predecessor, a Lebanese-born Muslim named Mouafac Harb.

Under Mr. Register, Al-Hurra covered the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last December. But in a stark break from Mr. Harb's era, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attendees at his conference were treated with unmistakable deference.

Al-Hurra's Dec. 12 report on the gathering included David Duke's praise for Mr. Ahmadinejad, and it took at face value the organizers' demand for Israel "to provide proof and evidence that certifies the occurrence" of the Holocaust. An official running the event was afforded the opportunity to show the open-mindedness of Holocaust deniers: "If we actually conclude with our experts through this meeting that the Holocaust is a real incident we will at that time admit its presence." (Transcript provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government employee.)...