Josh Rushing has been called a “turncoat,” a “pawn,” and the “biggest boob in America.” Bloggers have suggested that a special-ops team “take him out.” On Fox, Sean Hannity posted his face above the caption traitor. It has been a very long year. So how did this earnest, blue-eyed ex-Marine–a former press attaché to General Tommy Franks, no less–invite such vilification? Early last year, he agreed to become an on-air personality on a new 24-hour global news channel. Trouble is, Rushing’s new gig isn’t on CNN or ABC, and it certainly isn’t on Fox. He’s about to become the face of Al Jazeera International. The new channel is a sibling of Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language channel based in Qatar, which captured the world’s attention during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That station made the Bush administration apoplectic by broadcasting images of war casualties–dead civilians, the burned corpses of American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah–at the same time the United States was touting its precision bombing. It has also been the conduit for a string of videotapes from Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and is the preferred outlet of various radical Islamic groups for putting footage of tearful, pleading hostages before the world.
But Al Jazeera International (AJI) has grander ambitions than to be simply the enfant terrible of the Middle East. For starters, it will broadcast in English, giving it a much broader reach; its staffers are imports from upmarket operations such as the BBC, CNN, and Associated Press Television News (APTN); and it professes a rigorous code of ethics and the loftiest news-gathering goals. “The mission of Al Jazeera International is to provide accurate and impartial news with a global, international perspective,” says Will Stebbins, formerly an APTN regional editor and now AJI’s Washington bureau chief. “News in the U.S. clearly comes from a very culturally specific viewpoint that eclipses many important stories and issues. We want to provide different points of view from around the world.”
The format for the channel, which is currently scheduled to launch in late spring, is itself innovative. Instead of being run out of a central command post, AJI’s news day–and news management–will follow the sun: Programming will begin in Doha, Qatar, which will likely host a 12-hour chunk of the day, then shift to London for a four-hour segment, then to Washington, DC, for a 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. (local-time) slot, and finally to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The top of each hour will be hard news; the back half, analysis, chat shows, and documentaries, some of it generated by viewers. There will be only one feed, so viewers worldwide will all see the same broadcast at the same time.
