Al Hurra and its U.S.-funded Arabic language sister organizations.<\/a><\/p>\nGedmin accused Kari Lake, President Donald Trump\u2019s appointee to the American government agency overseeing Al Hurra, Voice of America and other U.S.-funded news programming abroad, of dodging his efforts to speak with her about the funding cutoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m left to conclude that she is deliberately starving us of the money we need to pay you, our dedicated and hard-working staff,\u201d Gedmin said in severance letters obtained by The Associated Press and excerpted on the website of Al Hurra\u2019s parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. <\/p>\n
Mohamed al-Sabagh, an Egyptian journalist working at the Al Hurra news website in Dubai, told the AP that all the staff in the website and the television channel received emails terminating their contracts.<\/p>\n
Al-Hurra is the latest U.S. government-funded news outlet \u2014 after Voice of America, Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and others \u2014 to cut staff and services amid what the outlets say is the move by the Trump administration and Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency to withhold their congressional appropriations.<\/p>\n
Lake, appointed to oversee the U.S. Agency for Global Media, describes her agency as being consumed by a \u201cgiant rot\u201d that requires the agency\u2019s destruction and rebuilding.<\/p>\n
The U.S.-backed news organizations were set up starting in the Cold War between the West and Soviet Union. Their designated goal was to provide objective news about the United States and other subjects overseas, often to people under authoritarian governments without access to a free press. <\/p>\n
The George W. Bush administration created Al Hurra in 2003, the same year his administration\u2019s invasion of Iraq overthrew that country\u2019s leader. Al Hurra\u2019s journalists covered the U.S. occupation and sectarian and extremist violence that followed, with some them dying on the job during the 2011 Arab Spring, and other political changes across the Middle East.<\/p>\n
While Al Hurra over the years faced charges of bias from both conservatives and liberals in the United States, it was one of the few outlets in its region providing space for freedom of the press and speech.<\/p>\n
In his note to staffers, Getmin said his organization would retain a couple of dozen staffers and a \u201cpresence\u201d online as court battles over the cuts play out in U.S. courts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes no sense,\u201d Gedmin wrote, \u201cto silence America\u2019s voice in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Knickmeyer reported from Washington.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
This story has been corrected to show that the news outlet is not off the air entirely. An earlier version said it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAIRO (AP) \u2014 The head of a U.S.-funded Arabic-language television and online news outlet that claims a 30…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[12268,12261,32,295,77,12264,4179,12266,12267,10470,12262,12263,839,12265,285,12022,49,7150,5213,978,659,10673,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-18429","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-department-of-government-efficiency","9":"tag-district-of-columbia","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-fires","14":"tag-general-news","15":"tag-george-w-bush","16":"tag-government-budgets","17":"tag-iraq","18":"tag-jeffrey-gedmin","19":"tag-kari-lake","20":"tag-middle-east","21":"tag-mohamed-al-sabagh","22":"tag-politics","23":"tag-soviet-union","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-united-states-congress","26":"tag-united-states-government","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-usa","29":"tag-washington-news","30":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114334681648454034","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}