How can you fight a war of ideas when you don't have any?

Today's Washington Post carries an article on the failure of Al-Hurrah, the U.S. backed television station that was supposed to spread American ideals into the Arab world. This part stuck out to me:

According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.

Al-Hurra, by contrast, faces cutthroat competition. About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. The BBC launched an Arabic-language news channel this year, and more rivals loom.

Of course during the Cold War days there was no internet and except into the 1980s no cable television, so there were many fewer sources of news, especially regarding news from the rest of the world outside of whichever Iron Curtain nation one was living. Today, the options are a little more expansive. Also, Radio Free Europe gained traction because people living in the Soviet empire for the most part not only didn't like communism, they also were angry about being under foreign rule, which is not the case in the Middle East (with exceptions).