Former “Nightline” reporter Dave Marash — who produced some of the more memorable, touching, edifying segments for ABC’s “old” Nightline — is joining Al-Jazeera’s “24-hour English-language network, to be launched this spring,” reports the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, former host Ted Koppel has joined both the Discovery Channel and NPR.
In an interview Thursday, Marash, 63, described his new position as “the most interesting job on Earth.”
Calling Al Jazeera “a thoroughly respectable news organization,” Marash, who will co-anchor the news from the network’s Washington studio, said the new show aimed to “win the high end. We want to give the most sophisticated, most nuanced and most global view of the day’s events.” … continued below (along with the soooo predictable nasty comments from a ‘winger) …
Writes Dave Lasky The American Thinker blog (odd choice for the name of this blog):
Well, I always thought Nightline was Al Jazeera-light, but can a reporter, whose reputation relies on honesty and not hyperbole, independence and not corruption, honestly describe his job with an Arab propaganda effort as “the most interesting job on Earth”?
How about medical researchers? How about leaders of nations? How about activists in honest aid groups serving in lesser-developed nations? The list can go on and on…but this shameless rhapsodizing over Al Jazeera leaves in bad taste in one’s mouth.
Al Jazeera keeps hiring Western Correspondents (David Frost)….what is their goal? Credibility and influence with Western audiences, despite a history of cooperating with terrorists?
Fishbowl DC has a slightly more balanced view of Marash’s move. The LAT story continues:
Al Jazeera, which is based in — and financed by — the Persian Gulf nation Qatar, has been denounced by Bush administration officials for what the State Department characterized as its “inflammatory” reports. On a number of occasions, it has been the first to broadcast communications from leaders of Al Qaeda. Other Arab nations, notably Saudi Arabia, have complained about the independence of its reporting.
Al Jazeera’s new English-language network, going head-to-head against CNN International and the BBC World Service, will include four hours of programming from Washington, co-anchored by Marash and an as-yet-unnamed woman.
Riz Khan, a former BBC reporter who most recently was host of the CNN International talk show “Q&A,” has also joined the staff, along with his CNN producer, James Wright, and Kieran Baker, a former editor and producer for CNN. Also on board is Josh Rushing, a former Marine Corps information officer in Iraq who was featured in “Control Room,” a 2004 documentary focusing on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. … (LAT, via Memeorandum)
When I posted the news of Ted Koppel’s departure from Nightline here, no one expressed much sadness. But I feared that we’d lose the ground-breaking reports that made Nightline stand out from the crowd — unforgettable stories such as those on starving North Korean children struggling to stay alive in China, a clever architecture professor who taught his students how to build dirt-cheap homes for the poor, and so many other memorable discoveries from around the world. The new Nightline format — with 3 to 4 stories per night — isn’t the same, particularly with the addition of the tawdry Martin Bashir, but it isn’t a disaster either.
Still, I’m very much looking forward to Al-Jazeera’s upcoming 24-hour English language channel, and I am very impressed that Al-Jazeera chose to hire such a veteran reporter despite his gray hair and his tummy. Marash knows how to tell a story, and he’s covered the news from all over the world. I hope I can get this new channel through DISH satellite.
I’m glad to hear this, although I have my doubts that Comcast will decide to carry al-Jazeera. I wonder if they could be talked into a streaming Internet feed.
Does al-Jazeera already have a Washington office? If so I wonder if His Nibs wants to bomb it.
Cable sucks. When we moved to the Peninsula, we were advised to get DISH satellite — which was like a foreign concept to us — but now we’d never switch back to cable. We get so many more channels, including off-beat channels such as Free Speech TV and LINKTV that the mainstream providers won’t air.
(We’d had cable in the Ballard neigbhorhood of Seattle, and it was a constant nightmare … the cabling was ancient, and they wouldn’t invest to improve it, so it was constantly going down. Drove us crazy. It was such a huge relief to get DISH and never, once, lose reception in the last five years.)
I’m not trying to advertise DISH, although they are an affiliate of this site, but they’ve been advertising a new deal on TV — 60 channels for $19.95/month + HBO/Showtime/Starz free for three months.
My affiliation with Comcast is mostly inertial. I know where all the channels are, and my TiVo knows where everything is set up. Plus Comcast supplies my datapipe.
I may someday get mad and motivated enough at them to change providers, but only if I can get my TiVo to work with Dish and I can set myself up with a better net connection. Yes, I know about Dish’s equivalent of TiVo, but I have a lifetime subscription and I’m already familiar with how my TiVo works (it is after all a Linux box) so I plan to stay with it until it or my TiVo service falls apart.
TiVo or TiVo-ish devices would be cool. Some people I know (Darcy) sure wish I had it so I wouldn’t commit the mortal sin of forgetting to tape essential (Arrested Development) television.
Do a Google search for “MythTV”. It’s a do-it-yourself project that uses a custom version of Linux and a TV tuner card as the basis of a do-it-yourself TiVo-ish project. I’d jump for it, but I already have the TiVo.
Don’t know how interfaces with Dish, but odds are someone has put the work into it.
Oh, and don’t let the do-it-yourself nature of the project scare you. I’m sure there are techies out there in the woods who would be glad to assemble one for you for some combination of money, pizza, beer and sweet-talk.
From the Fishbowl quotes of the NY Observer story:
Good for al-jazeera.
Caution to Dave Marash, do not visit Iraq.
I’ll always remember Dave Marash from his days as a local news anchor in NYC in the mid- and late 1970s. Some years later, when working as News Director for my college radio station, I found out that Marash was an alumnus. At that time, Marash was working as an anchor in Washington, DC, and I was able to get in touch with him and arrange to do an interview on his take on current events (Iran-Contra was the issue of the day).
A good and honorable man, and I’m already regretting the degree to which he’ll doubtless be slimed by the wingnuts for taking this new job.
(Koppel, for anyone who missed this the other day, has signed on with the New York Times to be a regular contributing columnist for their op-ed page, which means he’ll pen stories whenever he feels like it. Unfortunately, his columns will almost certainly be behind the much-despised TimesSelect subscription firewall.)