David Marash is one of those Emmy-winning journalists who trucks in a different kind of celebrity than the name-trotting sort headlining newscasts today. He’s a genuine article, deep in voice and language, the rare breed of television media personality who believes in the strength of long-format journalism, reporting stories to conclusion, rather than fatigue, and he’s got the resume to back it up.
He’s most known for his 16-year stint with Ted Koppel on Nightline, winning awards for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800. But, when that show was cancelled, he made an interesting move: Al Jazeera English.
He’s lead anchor over there now, charged with the western hemisphere. The network strives to be the first non-western international news network, diving head first into deep waters heavily patroled by CNN, Fox, MSNBC. They aim to compliment the others, to shift the balance of the international news mechanism, he says, and they do that by becoming a compliment to existing coverage, not a competitor.
“Where other agencies spend 80 percent of their coverage in North American, European, Japanese, and Israeli stories,” he says, “Al Jazeera, on the other hand, does 70 percent of its reporting everywhere else.”
And of course, he opened with Iraq.
“One thing every Iraqi knows,” Marash said, “is that they don’t want to be dominated by outsiders. The country has a long history of domination, and the Americans ignored that history. Instead, they went in with distinctly American ideas of good governance, inconsiderate of what the Iraqis want.”
Marash contends that we wrote our own book. That we ignored volumes of data in the world indicating that what we were planning would end badly. That the Middle East has played host countless times to invading bodies and without fail, the conflict ends badly. That, given all this, we should have known better.
It’s hard not to get into a discussion of conspiracy theory here. And it’s difficult, by the same token, to contradict Marash, who himself has spent years in the region covering these decades-long stories. But boiling down the current situation in Iraq to misunderstood objectives might just be too simple, ingnorant of administration objectives beyond stemming conflict in the region; objectives likely to take years to uncover.
More detail means richer communication, Marash says of journalists. “Reporters must represent reality with fidelity.”
And that’s what Al Jazeera English aims to do. By reducing the number of stories reported in any given half-hour segment, the network aims to drive up the quality and depth of coverage across all stories. It’s a challenge, he says, as the staff of the network comes largely from mainstream media, and breaking bad habits is an ongoing fight.
Dave Marash is a smart guy. Put him on the podium and he’s your wise old grandfather dutifully illumniating the world for you, one race at a time. He’s been everywhere, seen it all, and has the breath left in him to talk about it at length. But in an era in which major media news is losing ground to infotainment, Marash’s vision of Al Jazeera might just have arrived in the nick of time.
The Q&A brought out the question that most were undoubtedly thinking: “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing working for Al Jazeera?” Marash was ditifully diplomatic and long-winded with a response that ended up having quite a fine point on it.
There were sort of two responses among my colleagues. The majority of the responses were, “Well, that’s Marash. If there’s a brick wall, he’ll put his head into it.” And the second response was, sort of, “How dare he.” And particularly, “How dare he, as a Jew, work for the Arabs.” In many ways, it’s the same mentality as the Dubai ports case. “How dare we contract for port security with a global firm that happens to be based in the Arab world?”
Al Jazeera is a funny network. In the West, it’s the voicebox of the terrorist arm, heavily criticized for displaying Al Quaeda beheadings and desert manifestos. But what we don’t see, Marash contends, is the network’s diligence in reporting both sides of the conflict, as graphic as those sides may be. That’s what happens when you have a boss “whose bottom line is not the bottom line, is not share-holder value, but is the product itself.”