The measured weekly audience for U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) programming grew by 11 percent to reach an unprecedented 394 million people in fiscal year 2021, according to the agency’s Performance and Accountability Report recently submitted to Congress.
The audience grew by 40 million adults, despite significant operational challenges for the agency in FY 2021, from leadership transition to pandemic limitations.
“The continued global effects of COVID-19, political turmoil and social unrest in many of our broadcasting areas, and increasingly disrupted media environments have driven people to seek out reliable and credible information so they can make informed decisions about their lives,” said USAGM Acting CEO Kelu Chao. “It’s clear from the research that more and more people are turning to our networks for information they can trust.”
USAGM continued to reach large audiences in countries of importance to U.S. national security and foreign affairs interests, including Russia (7.9 million), China (65.4 million), and Iran (12.2 million). Audience growth also occurred in several key markets – including Turkey (up 287 percent since the agency’s last survey there), Burma (up 132 percent since the last survey), and Vietnam (up 241 percent since the last survey) – as well as from previously unsurveyed markets, including India (29.4 million) and the Philippines (5.0 million).
Research shows audience growth across all platforms, particularly 208 million people watching USAGM content on television and 142 million listening on radio each week. Audiences consuming USAGM-sponsored content on digital platforms grew 35 percent to reach 184 million.
USAGM’s networks — the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — deliver news and programming via radio, television, and internet in 62 languages.
A sixth USAGM entity, the Open Technology Fund, provides tools to help audiences overcome internet restrictions and surveillance. In FY 2021, these tools saw a 177 percent increase in weekly unique users, 121 percent increase in weekly visits, and 44 percent increase in total proxy traffic over the previous year.
Research conducted to estimate the agency’s global audience adheres to standards developed by the Conference of International Broadcasters’ Audience Research Service and reports the number of unique individuals who access USAGM content, or what is referred to as the unduplicated audience. This global audience estimate is just one element in USAGM’s annual performance report. The agency also measures impacts based on quantitative and qualitative data on a wide range of factors, including program quality and credibility, engagement with content, and audience understanding of current events.
A brief Audience and Impact summary is available here.
The full Performance and Accountability Report is available here.
The chairperson of ABC Australia has issued a statement in connection with the Australian Senate’s intentions to launch an inquiry into the broadcaster’s complaint handling procedure:
The inquiry into the ABC’s complaints handling process announced by Senate Communications Committee Chair, Senator Andrew Bragg, appears to be a blatant attempt to usurp the role of the ABC Board and undermine the operational independence of the ABC.
As Senator Bragg is aware, in October the ABC Board initiated an independent review of the ABC’s complaints system by two eminent experts, Professor John McMillan AO, former Commonwealth and NSW Ombudsman, and Jim Carroll, former SBS Director – News and Current Affairs. The terms of reference for the review are comprehensive and wide-ranging.
This review is consistent with the duties of the Board under the ABC Act. Under Section 8 of the Act, the ABC Board has the legal responsibility for developing codes of practice relating to programming matters and to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial.
The fact that these powers are given to the Board, not to the Government of the day, is a key pillar of the ABC’s operational independence.
This review is well underway and members of Parliament, including Senator Bragg, have already been interviewed as part of the review process. An issues paper will be released shortly and the review will then be seeking public submissions. The review will be rigorous and thorough and its findings will be released by the ABC board in April 2022.
Instead of respecting the integrity of this process, the Senate Committee under the leadership of Senator Bragg has decided to initiate a parallel process. I will leave it to Senator Bragg to explain his motives but the impact of this action is clear. As Chair of the ABC Board I am duty bound to call out any action that seeks to undermine the independence of the national broadcaster.
Once again, an elected representative has chosen to threaten the ABC’s independence at the expense of the integrity of this irreplaceable public service. Any incursion of this kind into the ABC’s independence should be seen by Australians for what it is: an attempt to weaken the community’s trust in the public broadcaster.
This is an act of political interference designed to intimidate the ABC and mute its role as this country’s most trusted source of public interest journalism. If politicians determine the operation of the national broadcaster’s complaints system, they can influence what is reported by the ABC.
A fundamental democratic principle underpinning the ABC has been its independence from interference by those motivated by political outcomes. Politicians, like all citizens, are welcome to criticise anything they find wrong or objectionable that is published by the ABC but they cannot be allowed to tell the ABC what it may or may not say.
Transparency and accountability are important and the Senate Committee performs a vital role. The ABC attends Senate Estimates hearings on multiple occasions every year and answers hundreds of questions on notice. It is extremely regrettable, however, that the Committee has, on this occasion, sought to undertake a task that is not only already underway but also is the legal responsibility of the ABC Board.
When Parliament resumes later this month, I respectfully ask the Senate to act to defend the independence of the ABC, as Australia’s national broadcaster, by passing a motion to terminate or suspend this inquiry until the independent process commissioned by the ABC Board has been completed.
White House names Amanda Bennett as USAGM CEO nominee
The White House has announced it intends to nominate Pulitzer-winning journalist and former Voice of America director Amanda Bennett to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
“I am honored by this nomination,” Bennett told VOA late Friday. “If confirmed, I will be so proud to work with all the dedicated journalists at USAGM who are doing the critical and difficult work around the world of upholding and demonstrating the value of a free press.”
USAGM Acting CEO Kelu Chao announced the nomination Friday afternoon in an email to all staff at the independent agency, which oversees journalists from five news networks: the Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, as well as The Open Technology Fund.
“We look forward to her congressional confirmation and her arrival!” Chao said. President Joe Biden announced Chao’s appointment as interim CEO on Jan. 20, 2021.
BBC News launches Africa Eye in French across 27 markets
For the first time BBC Africa Eye will become available in Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Congo, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Gabon, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Togo and Tunisia.
EDAN is a pan-African TV station which targets women and the youth across the continent. Founded in 2015, the station is available on Canal Plus Afrique, a satellite subscription-based service broadcasting to 27 countries across Africa. The channel features movies, music and documentary programmes targeted to African audiences across Sub Saharan Africa.
BBC Africa Eye is the award-winning investigative strand that has created a network of trained investigative journalists across the continent to deliver high-impact investigations. Launched four years ago the investigative series has become known for holding power to account.
Evelyn Accrombessi, CEO EDAN, says: “EDAN viewers will now be able to watch BBC Africa Eye, a high-quality BBC programme which will be a great addition to our schedule. We are delighted and very satisfied with the discussions with the BBC teams, their availability and their responsiveness in setting up this partnership. We hope that this is the first step of a long collaboration between the BBC and EDAN.”
Anne Marie Nwaobasi , Business Development Manager, Francophone Africa, BBC World Service says: “This partnership reaches new audiences across Francophone Africa giving them access to BBC’s primetime investigative series.
“BBC Africa Eye features original and high-impact BBC investigations from across Africa. Audiences in more locations across Africa can now watch this award-winning programme on EDAN.”
BBC Africa Eye will be aired on the following days:
A number of Egyptian media outlets have reported that outdoor advertising for Al Jazeera have appeared in the Egyptian capital Cairo. This is the first time for a number of years that Al Jazeera has been able to publicly advertise in the country.
Egypt’s Al-Masry al-Youm posted images of the advertising blllboards, and posts on social media showed the adverts.
The Al Jazeera bureau in Cairo has been raided and equipment seized repeatedly since the January 2011 uprising in Egypt. The channel’s staff have been detained, with accusations of inciting violence against the state. Al Jazeera has always denied the allegations.
Some commentators in Egypt have suggested that the Qatar-headquartered broadcaster may be able to reopen its Cairo bureau in the coming months.
Al Jazeera marks first quarter century anniversary
As Al Jazeera marks its 25th anniversary on November 1, the history of the media network is beset with the inherent risks, obstacles and outright attacks it had to weather by reporting from the world’s most strife-stricken places.
The dangers faced by Al Jazeera included multiple threats to shut down its bureaus and the killing or detention of its front-line journalists. They ranged from phone hacking and network-wide cyber-attacks, to state-sanctioned satellite scrambling and outright aerial bombardments on bureau locations.
Al Jazeera launched its first TV broadcast as an Arabic-language satellite news channel in 1996 from Doha, Qatar — dedicated to providing comprehensive news and live debate as the first independent news channel in the Arab world.
Since then, it has grown into the Al Jazeera Media Network, with several outlets in multiple languages. A private corporation for public benefit, the network now includes television channels, websites and other digital platforms.
Al Jazeera has led international coverage of some of the world’s most pivotal events — the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, for example — while reporting on crucial ongoing stories, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Afghanistan.
In the midst of these endeavours, Al Jazeera has been singled out by governments the world over who have tried to muzzle its reporting. In 2005, it was alleged that then-US President George W Bush mulled bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, in a meeting with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But it was mostly “Arab oppressive governments” that over the years have tried their level best to shutter Al Jazeera, said Sherif Mansour, programme director of the Committee to Protect Journalists in the Middle East and North Africa.
“During the Arab uprisings, and specifically since 2015, multiple countries blamed the channels for showing opposition voices in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, and others where there was almost no other critical local or regional coverage,” Mansour told Al Jazeera.
“Accusing Al Jazeera of supporting terrorism, spreading false information, and insults has been the hallmarks of those censorship regimes, which also used it against other channels and independent individual journalists,” he said.
Press freedom advocates and media watchdogs, including Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, however, have condemned the various attacks on the network.
Raided and shuttered bureaus
Al Jazeera’s bureaus around the world have often borne the brunt of the pressure the network faced over the past 25 years — having been shuttered, hacked, raided, fired upon and even bombed from the air by authorities in various countries.
Most recently, at least 20 plain-clothed police officers stormed Al Jazeera’s bureau in Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, ordering all the staff to leave. This came in the wake of President Kais Saied’s move to remove the government in July.
Reporters said they were suddenly ordered by security forces to turn off their phones and were not allowed back into the building to retrieve their personal belongings.
Last year, in Malaysia, police raided Al Jazeera offices and seized two computers as part of an investigation into a documentary, a move Al Jazeera called a “troubling escalation” in a government crackdown on press freedom.
Other countries that have shut down Al Jazeera offices include Sudan and Yemen.
“We have documented many cases where the channel offices were forcibly shut down, had their journalist detained, expelled, and even killed,” Mansour said.
Calls to close down the network as a whole also came when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism.
At the time, the quartet issued a list of 13 demands to be met for the embargo to end — including shuttering Al Jazeera, which dragged the network into the regional crisis that lasted for more than three years.
Attacks on journalists
But nothing has hit the network as hard as losing its own people in its quest of telling truth to power. Since its inception, 11 Al Jazeera employees have paid the ultimate price in the line of duty.
In April 2003, correspondent Tariq Ayoub died as a result of severe injuries he sustained when a US fighter jet bombarded Al Jazeera’s bureau in the al-Karkh neighbourhood in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. A US state department spokesman at the time said the attack was a mistake.
In 2004, Rasheed Wali was shot dead when covering clashes between US troops and Jaish al-Mahdi fighters in Karbala, Iraq.
Then, in 2011, cameraman Ali Hassan Al Jaber was killed in an ambush near rebel-held Benghazi in eastern Libya. Ali was returning to Benghazi from a nearby town when unknown fighters opened fire on the car he and his colleagues were travelling in.
In January 2013, correspondent Mohamed al-Massalma was shot dead by sniper fire while reporting from Syria’s Deraa. A year later, again in Syria, Hussein Abbas was killed when he was on his way back from covering the fighting on the outskirts of Idlib.
In September 2014, digital reporter Mohamed Abduljaleel al-Qasim was killed in an ambush by unidentified assailants in Idlib. Later that year, Mahran al-Deery, also a digital correspondent, was killed in a car accident when he was on his way to report on fighting between opposition factions and Syrian government forces in Sheikh Miskeen on the outskirts of Deraa. The incident occurred when he switched off his car’s headlights to avoid detection.
A year later, in June, photographer Mohamed al-Asfar was also killed in Deraa while covering fighting between opposition fighters and government troops in the Manshiya neighbourhood of the city. Also in 2015, photographer Zakariya Ibrahim died of shrapnel injuries he sustained while reporting on a Syrian government bombardment in the province of Homs.
Tragedy struck again in Syria in 2016 when Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Ibrahim al-Omar was killed in a Russian air raid on the town of Tamanyeen in Idlib province. Three weeks later, reporter Mubarak al-Ebadi was killed when was covering clashes in Jawf governorate in northern Yemen.
In honour of the fallen journalists, Al Jazeera established a monument at its headquarters in Doha; a steel tree sculpture with leaves that carry the names of the reporters. The monument serves as a constant reminder of the high price that has been paid in the pursuit of facts.
Al Jazeera’s steel tree monument carries the names of the journalists who have paid the ultimate price in the line of duty [Al Jazeera]
In other instances, journalists working for Al Jazeera have been wounded in the field, while many more have been intimidated, banned, forced to leave their country, prosecuted, and in some cases jailed for years.
Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was detained in the infamous US-run Guantanamo Bay facility for six years.
He was transferred there one month after Pakistani security forces arrested him at the Afghan-Pakistan border in December 2001. No charges have ever been brought against the Sudanese national.
He was regularly tortured and launched a hunger strike to protest against his detention in 2007.
“Sami al-Haj should never have been held so long. US authorities never proved that he had been involved in any kind of criminal activity,” said Reporters Without Borders at the time of his release. “This case is yet another example of the injustice reigning in Guantanamo.”
In a more recent case, Egyptian journalist Mahmoud Hussein was released from prison in Cairo in February after being held for more than four years without formal charges or trial. The 53-year-old had been held under preventive detention since December 2016 while visiting his family for a holiday.
He was accused of “incitement against state institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos” — allegations that Al Jazeera rejected.
During his time in jail, Hussein suffered physically and psychologically. He was held for long periods in solitary confinement and denied proper medical treatment when he broke his arm in 2017.
“It is no coincidence these attacks happen mostly in one of the most censored regions in the world,” Mansour said, adding that Egypt is one of the “worst jailers in the world”.
Bombed offices
On May 15, an Israeli air raid destroyed a tower in the besieged Gaza Strip that also housed the media offices of Al Jazeera, The Associated Press and other news outlets during an 11-day Israeli assault on the coastal enclave.
The owner of the 11-storey al-Jalaa building, which also housed residential apartments, had less than an hour to inform everyone inside to evacuate.
Al Jazeera Gaza Bureau Chief Wael al-Dahdouh said that moments before the tower crashed to the ground, Al Jazeera crew was on-air nearby.
“We quickly became the news that we were covering … We saw it collapse with the rest of the world, right before our eyes,” al-Dahdouh recalled.
Despite these “sad moments”, Al Jazeera’s image and voice “remained loud and intact”, he said.
Al-Dahdouh noted there has not been an “official reason” from the Israeli side as to why they attacked and destroyed the structure.
“Choosing to destroy the building, which housed press offices and civilian homes, during such a crucial time … means Israel may have been angered from the amount of coverage by Al Jazeera,” al-Dahdouh added.
The attack in Gaza was not the first time an Al Jazeera office was bombed.
In 2002, a US missile destroyed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Fortunately, no journalists were in the office at the time. US officials said they believed the target was a “terrorist” site and did not know it was an office of Al Jazeera’s.
Telling the human story
Despite all these hardships, Al Jazeera continues to tell the stories that need telling.
“Journalists should not be subjected to arbitrary killing and detention, enforced disappearances, unfair trials, and psychological and physical torture; because of their profession and moral duty to uncover and impart truth,” said Mostefa Souag, acting Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network.
“Information today, is like water and air for human beings – it’s illegal to be forbidden. Journalism is not a crime!” he added.
Al Jazeera marks its 25th anniversary on November 1, while remembering the wounded and deceased colleagues, in particular, in the pursuit of shining a light on the issues that matter most from around the world.
It is a path full of risks and obstacles, but a journey we are determined to continue — to always tell the human story.
