American Laryngitis

A Middle East trip reveals how Chinese and Russian disinformation schemes overwhelm America's tepid voice on issues of global significance

Photo by James O’Shea

In the fall of 2023, I traveled to six countries as the board chair of a Middle East news organization to inspect our regional offices. I ended my trip at the Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv three days before Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack on Israel spawned a savage war in Gaza.

Upon hearing about my journey, many friends marveled at my good timing, although, as a career journalist, I regretted missing a big story. As I reflect on my travels, which included stops in Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Dubai, and Israel, I realize that I didn’t really miss the story. I’m still living it.

The incident that sparked my insight occurred when a Palestinian colleague drove me to lunch with a long-standing Israeli friend a week before the war. As we chatted over lunch on a sunny day on a leafy street in Jerusalem, an eavesdropper barked at me: “Why aren’t you speaking Hebrew?”

I ignored the taunt from the interloper. The more I thought about the experience, though, the more I realized the intruder had a point, however misguided it may have been. We were not really conversing in English, let alone Hebrew, which I don’t speak, or any other recognized vernacular. We were all speaking a new tongue unique to our age – the dialogue of disinformation, and it is having a huge impact in the Middle East and beyond.

Disinformation saturates the debates and conversations in the Israeli and Arab world, serving as a proxy for a broader global discourse that occurs daily. Truth, lies, smears, and half-truths dominate discussions. Conversations about serious issues veer off into verbal exchanges where accuracy, facts, documentation, and context seem irrelevant. We discuss the latest political spin, reaction, or distortion rather than what happened.

As I surveyed the information landscape on my trip, the impact of the drive toward ubiquitous disinformation stunned me, particularly when it came to our Chinese and Russian adversaries.

Chinese Arab language broadcasts resonate widely in Middle East news casts. Big Green signs populate cities with their large black RT initials advertising Russia Today, a state-owned international Arabic news channel.

In contrast, America’s presence involved a government-run Arab language broadcast and digital news operation in which I was involved. Comparatively, few paid much attention to it. For all practical purposes, America had laryngitis.

The numbers tell part of the story. The organization I chaired, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), attempted to provide American-style, factual news and programming, with an annual budget that ranged from $106 to $130 million over the past decade.

In contrast, CGTN Arabic, which streams news, dramas, and other shows with a Chinese and anti-American perspective, spent $4 billion launching its pan-Arabic news channel in 2004 in the United Arab Emirates. That doesn’t count how much it has poured into CGTN Arabic programming in the ensuing years.

The Russian government has consistently increased funding for the RT organization over the years, with budgets reaching an estimated $400 million a year as of the mid-2010s.

The investments have paid off for America’s adversaries in the region, which is home to more than 450 million people. Merissa Khurma, a Middle East policy expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, says the Chinese narrative emphasizes its economic success and criticism of the United States.

In a 2023 article for the Wilson Center, Khurma, who grew up in the Middle East, stated that China remained more popular than the United States in a survey of nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa, which included 23,000 interviews.

“In another survey of more than 50 cities across the region focused on Arab youth, including in the UAE, a key economic partner to China, the vast majority of interviewees identified China as a key ally to their nation,” said the Wilson Center’s Khurma. The Wilson Center has been effectively shuttered by the actions of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE.

Russia fares well among the region’s population, too. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, an independent organization with ties to Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party, surveyed nine Arab countries, in addition to Turkey, Iran, and Israel.

“The survey revealed that in five countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan—all considered to be traditional allies to Washington—public opinion showed greater confidence in Russia than the United States,” the foundation’s survey said, despite the war in Ukraine.

Even public opinion in the UAE and Qatar—two of Washington's closest allies—suggested that a Russian presence is more beneficial to the Arab region than the U.S, the survey said, even though Qatar wants to gift President Donald Trump with a $400 million aircraft.

The situation probably has grown far worse as Arab animosity towards the U.S. has escalated because of American support for Israel’s rampage in Gaza.

Robert M. Gates, a former U.S. Defense Secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, says the Middle East disinformation reflects a broader issue. Although he attaches great importance to U.S. military power in the contest with Russia and China, Gates wrote a piece in The Washington Post stating that our two major adversaries are “running rings around us” in an information war that America once won hands down, particularly during the Cold War.

China and Russia, he wrote, have developed extraordinary global strategic communications and foreign influence operations, committing unprecedented sums of money to establishing modern media operations that target both internal and international audiences. “The country that invented public relations is being outcommunicated around the world,” Gates wrote, “by an authoritarian Russia and an increasingly totalitarian China.”

Gates argues that the problems go beyond money. The U.S., he says, should not attempt to reinvent Cold War policies and institutions that the nation has allowed to atrophy. Instead, he says, the United States needs a modern global engagement plan for strategic communications that advances its national security interests.

“This plan should include a road map for engagement with foreign publics and leaders focused especially on sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America,” he says, “A key part of the plan should be a people-to-people exchange programs that send American musicians, sports figures, and artists abroad and brings college students to the United States with government support.”

Secretary Gates says America also needs more aggressive efforts to “break the digital communications firewalls” erected by America’s adversaries, which allow them to “propagate false narratives within their borders unchecked by independent views.”

Part of the problem involves the diminishing foreign news operations of American media companies. Outside of The New York Times, few other American news organizations invest the resources required to fully staff new bureaus that deliver sound journalism about regions of the world, both volatile and otherwise.

The Trump administration ignores the concerns of Secretary Gates and others, too, with its tariff policies and aggressive attacks on foreign students, including many launched under the guise of antisemitism for engaging in pro-Palestinian protests about America’s supportive role of Israel.

In its purge of the federal government, Musk and his DOGE team target the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, for steep budget cuts. As a former chair of the MBN, I understand that the organization needs reforms, particularly in its upper ranks.

By placing it on budgetary life support, though, America is leaving the information field wide open for further domination by America’s adversaries. Besides MBN, the USAGM oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and several organizations that, despite their faults, provide crucial information to parts of the world without a free press.

With its recent actions, the Trump administration plays into the hands of China and Russia. Sweeping economic and environmental changes are redrawing the world map. Global power is undergoing a gradual change. The East/West dynamic that has shaped the world map since World War II is evolving into a potentially robust alignment of North-South nations that America would be wise to embrace.

We need to make friends, not enemies. In a world where disinformation has become the language of choice, America needs to weigh in with some clear thinking and straight talk.

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, and chairman of the board of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.