Guardian: American Anchor Quits Al Jazeera

(Natch–this was published in the UK since the American media has effectively sidelined Al Jazeeras presence on the media spectrum.)

By Brian Stelter

Dave Marash, the most prominent American anchor (and a former colleague and friend) on Al Jazeera English, has quit the 24-hour news channel, citing an increased amount of editorial control exercised by the channel’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

“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,” Mr. Marash, a former “Nightline” correspondent, said in his first interview since his departure was reported by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday.

Not that most Americans would notice: although Al Jazeera English is available to everyone on YouTube, so far it has been unable to secure cable distribution in the United States.

He called his time at Al Jazeera English “very, very satisfying,” but said that the editorial direction had shifted during his time there.

Mr. Marash signed a two-year contract with the channel, formerly named Al
Jazeera International, before it was introduced in November 2006. Mr. Marash
was in many ways the American face of the global news operation,
co-anchoring a daily newscast from Washington, D.C.

Mr. Marash praised the channel¹s coverage of regions often ignored by
Western media organizations, including Latin America and Africa. But he said
the channel had been “under-manned from the start” in the United States,
where two correspondents are expected to cover all developments. He said the
editorial input from the Washington bureau, “small at the start, has gotten
smaller and smaller.”

Mr. Marash said that the headquarters in Doha provided more and more
direction about the assignment of stories and the point of view of news
coverage, which meant that the main news bureaus ‹ not only in Washington,
but also in London and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ‹ saw their autonomy shrink.
This meant that the English-language channel started to more closely
resemble its larger sibling, the prominent Arabic-language channel Al
Jazeera, he said.

“They started covering the whole world very well, but from the point of view and the interests of Doha and the surrounding region,” he said.

On Wednesday The Guardian reported that the channel¹s leaders in Doha “are believed to want to see resources concentrated on consolidating popularity among its heartland audience” in the Middle East. The newspaper said that more than 15 staff members of Al Jazeera English “have quit or resigned in recent months amid complaints of a lack of clarity over its direction, contractual disputes and speculation over a relaunch later this year.”

Mr. Marash also said he feuded with network executives and producers about the pace of the news broadcasts. He had expected that Al Jazeera English would “slow down the tempo of conventional news channels” by offering fewer stories in greater depth, but that did not happen.

In a review shortly after the channel debuted, Alessandra Stanley said it
looks like CNN International and sounds like a cross of C-Span and Fox News: the stories are long and detailed (that’s the C-Span part); behind the news reports is an overall sensibility that is different from that of most mainstream television news organizations (that’s the Fox News part).” She detected an interest in bringing a non-Western perspective to the West.”

This is a shame. Al Jazeera does do an excellent series called WITNESS and another Listening Post out of London. But, yes some of its newscasts seem to be imitating the approach of competitors like CNN and Fox, too zippy, with a high story count. Part of the problem no doubt is its desire to produce something familiar to English speaking viewers and the hostility of American cable operators who blocked Al Jazeera from getting carriage and assured its US audience would be small.

Viewers Ignore Networks’ New TV Shows

The broadcast networks, ramping up production following the Hollywood writers’ strike, are finding that most of the 10 comedies and dramas launched in the last three months — such as NBC’s high-profile Internet pickup “quarterlife” — are striking out with viewers.

Former TF Editor’s New Blog Assesses Media Politics and the Alternative Press
Written by Toward Freedom

IMPACT OF STRIKE ASSESSED

Bradley Laing writes: “I have waited, and asked E! Entertainment Online, In Touch, US Weekly how the mass audience would react to the writers strike, and it seems I have an answer: They switched to cable, but they didn’t stop watching television and go to movies, or sporting events, or buy radically more DVDs (or rent radically more DVDs than usual)or buy radically larger numbers of books.

Writers Strike Sped Viewer Shift From Broadcast to Cable
By Jon Lafayette

The Writers Guild of America strike helped to accelerate the shift of viewers from broadcast to cable, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by Turner Broadcasting.

Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner, said that before the strike began to affect broadcast programming, live ratings among viewers 18 to 49 were down 12%. During the first quarter, those losses grew to 15%.

Those broadcast losses came on top of a record-setting 11% decline in adults 18 to 49 last season, he added.

IN PRAISE OF MATT TAIBBI

Lawrence Houhteling writes:

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a big fan of
Matt Taibbi ever since a few years back when he did a
review of Thomas Friedman’s latest ill-hatched
banality that left the author lying all-but-dead in
some poorly lit parking-lot of the mind. We could
almost call him “Matt the Knife.”

But he’s incredibly generous, too, and he’s captured
the trick of sounding like your good friend trying to
think things through. Hear him taking on the posse
baying after Jeremiah Wright:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13696

Sample line: “these milquetoast pundits never just say
they think a guy sucks; they always say his behavior
‘raises questions’ ”

ON THE PROTEST AT BEAR STEARNS

Mary Ellen Churchill writes from San Francisco

“I sure wish I could have been there for this action! Thanks for reporting it!!

It wasn’t covered in the news out here at all last night. No mention whatsoever”

It wasn’t covered in San Francisco. Heavens, I wonder why. When I showed my film In Debt We Trust out there, the Chronicle sent its junior film reviewer Allan Johnson to trash it. “

He wrote i that he wanted to see another film.

“The most fascinating possibility in the movie is the looming Depression-like collapse that could happen when America’s collective bills come due. Schechter imagines a financial collapse that will turn us into modern-day serfs, but I would have liked to see more about what this potential future will be like.”

Oh he would, would he? The Chronicle then declined to run an op-ed page piece I wrote with my views on that potential future, and now the Chron, in its wisdom, reports nada zip nada about homeowners battling the financial biggies like Bear Stearns who helped bring the collapse about, and who in fact collapsed until they were bailed out.

Senator Dodd notes that the Jay Dimon of JP Morgan who received mucho moolah from the Fed to buy Bear Stearns was in fact on the board of the NY Fed when the deal went down. Blatant conflict, you ask. No—just business as usual. It took a Senator to break this story….I didn’t see any media commenting on it.

CNBC did interview one banker at BEAR who said, anonymously of course, that he sympathized with the protest and would probably lose his job and his house. Few at Bear were talking about the issue or the protest—perhaps because they are in shock, crying or, in some cases, sneering.

One young man in the latter camp was interviewed by the NY Post. I have to put this in CAPS lest you miss it. He was identified as a 23 years old.

‘ ITS SEEMS KIND OF FUNNY TO PEOPLE UPSTAIRS…IT’S LIKE A BIG JOKE. WE REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE PROTESTING ABOUT.”

If anyone knows this yokel, please show him this video on YOU TUBE to refresh his memory:

Would someone tell him what his firm did?

DISSECTOR’S MEDIA RANT

I was watching my media colleagues at work. One young woman of CNBC was in front of me collecting “soundbites” and trying to get some NACA protesters outside Bear Stearns to talk to her. They didn’t want to, but she persisted, asking for their names. Two women just turned away and when they declined to perform for the camera, she turned to me, and asked for my comment as if I had any standing there. I wasn’t a NACA member.

So I let her have it with both barrels, rhetorically, that is, expressing my frustrations with the unbalanced media coverage of this crisis. Her cameraman seemed to enjoy what I was saying. I kept speaking quickly and I could see her looking for a pause in my “response” so she could cut me off. I know those techniques having practiced them in the past. I had wanted to get my media observations off my chest for awhile. (I wrote about them for Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade. See the link at the very top.

Fortunately, my colleague, the Serbian Director Mira Vukomanovic was there and started filming them filming me. So here’s what I had to say–and, most assuredly, you did NOT see this on CNBC. And never will. It’s on You Tube. Let me know what you think

I didn’t realize it, but the dub we made of her tape so quickly has text burnt into it from the DV deck (ie. timecode, “dv”, etc.). Please overlook.

LETTERS: I AM ASKED TO ADVERTISE ON MICHAEL SAVAGE.com

An ad agency wrote to me.

Michael Savage is one of the leading talk show hosts in America. His audience for the most part is male over 40.

When would be a good time to speak with you about promoting your products on his website MichaelSavage.com?

Here is the media kit
http://www.michaelsavage.com/advertising.html

AND FINALLY: WHAT ABOUT CHINESE DEMOCRACY?

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Many have tried, but so far nobody has been able to pry the decade-in-the-works Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy” from the hands of lone remaining original member Axl Rose.

Now, Dr Pepper thinks it’s up to the challenge. The soft drink company says it will give a free can of Dr Pepper to “everyone in America” (excluding ex-Guns members Slash and Buckethead) if “Chinese Democracy” arrives anytime during the calendar year 2008.

Rose responded on his band’s web site (http://www.gunsnroses.com) that the band was “surprised and very happy to have the support of Dr Pepper.” But the offer did not prompt him to rose to the challenge.

“Chinese Democracy” was most recently scheduled for release in March 2007, but promptly vanished from the schedule without a new date being set. Rose said at the time that all the recording had been completed, but there were some “scheduling difficulties.”
It will be the first album of fresh Guns N’ Roses material since the 1991 sets “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II.” Rose has reportedly burned through $13 million in recording expenses for

“Chinese Democracy,” and also burned his bridges with the bandmates who helped him turn Guns into one of the biggest rock groups in the world by the early 1990s.
Reuters/Billboard

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN2735728520080327

OK, hopefully now you know more than you did reading this blog.

I was on Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston by phone tonight talking about the economy and then afterwards zipped over to a NY studio for my first interview on Iran’s Press TV—conducted by novelist/anchor Afshin Rattansi. As far as the American mainstream media is concerned, both are considered foreign outlets.

Thanks to the Puffin Foundation for supporting outreach for our film IN DEBT WE TRUST.

Keep your letters coming. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org