America's Mideast TV news channel fires staff, goes off air

CAIRO: The head of a US-funded Arabic-language television and online news outlet that claims a 30 million-strong audience in the Middle East and North Africa terminated most staff and TV programming Saturday, accusing the Trump administration and Elon Musk of having "irresponsibly and unlawfully" cut off funding.

In notices sent to Al Hurra news staffers about their dismissals, chief Jeffrey Gedmin said he had given up on the US administration's freeze lifting anytime soon for the congressionally approved money for Al Hurra and its US-funded Arabic language sister organisations.

Gedmin accused Kari Lake, President Donald Trump's appointee to the American govt agency overseeing Al Hurra, Voice of America and other US-funded news programming abroad, of dodging his efforts to speak with her about the funding cutoff.

"I'm left to conclude that she is deliberately starving us of the money we need to pay you, our dedicated and hard-working staff," Gedmin said in severance letters obtained by The Associated Press and excerpted on the website of Al Hurra's parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mohamed al-Sabagh, an Egyptian journalist working at the Al Hurra news website in Dubai, said all the staff in the website and the television channel received emails terminating their contracts.

Al-Hurra is the latest US govt-funded news outlet - after Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and others - to cut staff and services amid what the outlets say is the move by the Trump administration and Musk's department of government efficiency to withhold their congressional appropriations. The US-backed news organisations were set up during the Cold War.ap