ProPublica, the high-profile, non-profit foray into investigative reporting, teamed with 60 Minutes last night for its first big story.
The investigation of Al Hurra, the U.S. government's four-year effort to create an alternative Middle East news network to Al Jazeera, was a by-the-book model of the craft.
The story had heft -- it asserts that $100 million a year is being wasted on a venture it found has neither much audience nor journalistic credibility nor a track record of improving U.S. image in the region.
It had juicy specifics. Al Hurra's programming blunders spotlighted by ProPublica included an hour-long lecture by a known terrorist and uncritical coverage of a conference of Holocaust deniers. Management has been a revolving door of Americans who do not speak Arabic and native speakers without strong journalism credentials.
Finally, the piece is resonating in Washington. The
Washington Post weighed in strongly with
the first of a two-part series of its own this morning, datelined Cairo and adding further damning details. Congressional critics, who have had an eye of Al Hurra's troubles for a while, are swinging into action.
If the business model question is whether a non-profit can graft its work to a commercial news enterprise, this first effort went off without a hitch. Narrated by Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes, the piece opened with a brief acknowledgment of ProPublica's collaboration. Otherwise it unfolded with all the familiar contours a 60 Minutes segment, including a polite but pointed grilling of those in charge. (ProPublica's editor-in-chief, Paul Steiger, has said the organization will approach collaborators early in the story development process to ensure continuity).
I wouldn't give the story a completely perfect grade. It follows the safest of constructs -- government wastes big money by inept execution of a dubious idea. Also the topic was not brand new. The
Wall Street Journal jumped Al Hurra's case in March 2007 with a series of conservative op-ed critiques by Joel Mowbray of its Anti-American and anti-Jewish blunders.
The ProPublica and
Washington Post stories bring forward the full dimensions of the debacle for most of us who haven't been paying attention. But my Googling found several earlier summaries that had the essentials -- notably
a crisp takeout by Marc Lynch of Williams College a year ago in the journal,
Arab Media & Society. (The Pro Publica site has multiple entries from both Lynch and Mowbray in a listing of related articles).
A concern about ProPublica has been that it will reflect a liberal agenda of its benefactors Herbert and Marion Sandler, bashing the administration and big corporations. Putting Steiger, longtime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, in charge, defused that objection. The Al Hurra piece neatly finesses it as well. Though the Bush administration presides over the foul-up, the project has bi-partisan roots and its failures have most offended conservatives.
Still it will merit watching over time whether ProPublica is equally zealous in taking on special interest funding of the Obama campaign or the equivalent story that gets tough on Democrats with feet-of-clay.
