A little belated, (I'm not in the habit of reading YaleGlobal Online too often, though Wallerstein's critique of Niall Ferguson is kinda fun,) but here's Seth Fein on Al-Hurra and empire:

Al-Hurra's development suggests less an expression of Middle Eastern public opinion from below than Washington's messages from above



Even as U.S. foreign policy touts its version of globalization – as a dialectical relationship between free trade and free thought – it moves outside the market to marginalize disruptive mass-media perspectives created by the very international interplay of supply and demand that it panegyrically trumpets. In doing so, it strikingly diminishes the rhetoric President Bush invoked in last January's State of the Union speech, when he asked Congress “to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy” in order to help the Middle East develop, among other things, “free markets” and a “free press.” The static produced by the contradictions between Washington's current international broadcasting ventures and its neoliberal ideology seems to replay the 1960s, when the United States Information Agency's unattributed TV activities in Latin America flouted modernization theory's promise that capitalist reforms would deliver democracy and sovereignty as well as economic development and social progress to “third world” countries. What “modernization” was to cold war liberalism during the 1960s “globalization” has been to post-cold war neoliberalism since the 1990s. In each era, Washington's deployment of international television has disregarded the tenets of the official ideology it broadcasts.