Al Jazeera Intl

Gail Shister
TVNewser Columnist

Bombs away, Al Jazeera.

Not.

Dave Marash, a recent exile of Al Jazeera English, says his new book "certainly won't be a 'kiss and tell,' 'cut and whine'" about his former employer.

The ex-"Nightline" correspondent confirms he's close to a deal for "The World Really is Watching," (working title), an analysis of the planet-wide expansion of television news. He's been mulling the topic for a while.

"I feel like I've got a book in me and I've got to get it out."

Whether Americans like it or not, Al Jazeera, the controversial Arab-language news network based in Doha, "is a major milestone in the movement toward a media global culture," says Marash, formerly AJE's Washington-based U.S. anchor.

Marash's two-year contract expired in February. He left March 21 in a huff over AJE's increasing Middle Eastern spin on its U.S. coverage, he says. His wife, Amy Marash, an AJE video journalist, exited a week before him.

"The oddity is, everywhere else, particularly in the Southern hemisphere, their reporting is excellent, intelligent, authentic and driven by people from the place they're covering," he says. "In the U.S., they found it 'hard to find' American talent. It wouldn't be that hard if they were looking."

Marash, 65, says his dissatisfaction had been building over the last eight or nine months "as it became clear to me that, for some reason, the U.S. was not a journalistic priority.

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The New York Times' Brian Stelter lands the first interview with Dave Marash since he left his position as anchor for Al Jazeera English.

Marash explained his reason for leaving, saying, "To put it bluntly, the channel that's on now — while excellent, and I plan to be a lifetime viewer — is not the channel that I signed up to do."

He also cited a lack of editorial input allowed from the Washington bureau and the fast pace of the news broadcasts as reasons for his departure.

• Earlier: "5 Questions For...Dave Marash"

In an opinion column in USA Today, titled "Does Al-Jazeera belong in the USA?", Souhelia Al-Jadda, an associate producer at Link TV's Mosaic: World News from the Middle East and a member of USA Today's board of contributors, laments the fact that more than one year after the launch of Al-Jazeera English, "no major U.S. cable or satellite company is willing to carry the station. Ghida Fakhry, an AJE anchor, told me political pressure has kept the channel out...

"Is Al-Jazeera English a mouthpiece for terrorists or a professional news network doing its job? Politicians and pundits should not be answering this question. Cable and satellite companies ought to broadcast AJE free from political pressures; then Americans can watch it and answer for themselves."

Dave Marash is a Washington-based anchor for Al Jazeera English, joining the network from ABC's Nightline. Before Nightline, Marash spent more than a decade in local news and sports, and worked at ABC's 20/20 and CBS Radio. Marash won an Overseas Press Club Award for his 1972 radio reports on the Munich Olympic Games terrorist attack. He is a Williams College graduate.

1. TVNewser: One year after its launch, Al Jazeera English is:
Marash: Exactly what it said it would be: a straight-up, international news channel, which goes at a slightly slower pace, doing fewer stories, but doing them with more depth and context, reporting especially from the places (South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia) more conventional news channels largely ignore, and ignoring many of the inconsequential stories (the adventures of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and O.J. Simpson, for examples) our competitors seem to thrive on.

2. TVNewser: Thoughts on the 'new' Nightline:
Marash: For 25 years Ted Koppel's Nightline gave its audience uniquely ambitious and detailed reports on the most important stories in the news. Working there for 16 years was an unbelievable opportunity. Today's Nightline, on many of its broadcasts, no longer looks unique, ambitious, detailed or devoted to news which is really important.

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Writing at CJR Daily, Lawrence Pintak thinks Al Jazeera English is beginning to find its footing. He cites coverage of Lebanese opposition leader Pierre Gemayel's assassination as an example. The breaking news coverage wasn't outstanding, "but it was in the analysis and depth of coverage that AJE finally began to distinguish itself."

He says the biggest difference between AJE and its competitors came as the funeral for Gemayel ended. "It was here that Jazeera's home court advantage came into play."

"Both BBC World and CNN International (a completely separate channel from the CNN domestic U.S. service) quickly switched away to other programming." But "AJE stayed with Lebanon, interviewing a Hezbollah spokesman, a perspective not heard on the other channels -- one in a comprehensive series of interviews with the key players in the drama not seen elsewhere. AJE's Lebanon specialist Omar al-Jassawi dug deeper into the impact on the country and region as a whole, while Middle East analyst Lamis Andoni noted that although Syria is widely presumed responsible for Gemayel's death, plenty of other players in the region had reason to want him dead." More...

Dave Marash tells AFP. "That's because everybody in American journalism is at worst curious and at best really interested, and even admiring, of what Al Jazeera English is all about."

More: "All of our competitors, CNN International, BBC World and the American networks, concentrate about 80 percent of their news gathering resources in Western Europe and North America. Al Jazeera English is going to concentrate about 80 percent of our news gathering outside of North America and Western Europe."

> Mark Lawson, Sydney Morning Herald: "The emphasis is quite deliberate: to show American [and] European... viewers how it has felt to be an Arab or Asian viewer of the BBC or CNN in recent decades..."

> Jim Krane, The Scotsman: "Al-Jazeera English was eager to show its global reach, shuffling live broadcasts from correspondents in Darfur, Iran, Zimbabwe and Brazil..."

> Alessandra Stanley, New York Times: "There was no fuss over Naomi Campbell’s court appearance on accusations that she had struck her maid or People magazine’s choice for 'Sexiest Man Alive' (George Clooney) on Al Jazeera English. A promo for an upcoming program described American policy in Iraq as George Bush’s 'alleged war on terror...'"

> Lawrence Pintak, Der Spiegel: "Make no mistake, it is refreshing to see stories from largely ignored corners of the world, but on Day One, they came at the expense of other important developments, whether in the United States, Europe or Japan..."

> Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle: Dave Marash "and his Washington bureau were to occupy four hours of the channel's 24-hour news cycle, but instead were limited to a half-hour slot at 3 p.m. PST and to news updates." Also: "There was little corporate advertising..."

I think Will Stebbins, Al Jazeera English's Washington bureau chief, would like you to call your cable operator and demand to see his new network.

"Eighty million people around the world want to see Al-Jazeera, but no-one in America is capable of seeing it," he tells The Age [AU]. "If I were an American, I would be frustrated having cable systems decide for me."

Send your impressions to tvnewser@mediabistro.com or drop them in the tip box...

Al Jazeera English's premiere featured stories from Russia, Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq -- all "important, no doubt, but not exactly the most pressing issue when the BBC, Sky and others were reporting that people in Japan had been warned to flee a tsunami which was expected to hit the coast within the next few minutes," the Guardian's Brian Whitaker blogs. "Al Jazeera mentioned it in passing but then plunged on with an exclusive five-minute report about ... well, Al Jazeera, actually."

Thankfully, the tsunami turned out to be minor. "If this had been a major wave AJE would be in serious trouble," an e-mailer says...

> Here's a summary of blog reaction to the launch...

Dave Marash, the former ABC News correspondent turned Washington anchor for Al Jazeera English, regrets the limited carriage of the new network in America.

"It's disappointing. Of course, you want to play to your home crowd if you can," he tells The New York Sun.

But he thinks the problem of carriage will become less important over time. "The cable-satellite deficit is a very temporary problem. I think in 10 years broadband through the Internet will be the distribution route of choice," he says...

> Also: The Washington Post profiles Marash in a story titled "Al Jazeera's U.S. face..."