Al Jazeera's U.S. Face

Dave Marash, longtime network newsman, is now in the anchor chair for the new Al Jazeera english-language network. Pictured, Marash, right, chats with planning editor Nathalie Joost, left, in the Al Jazeera newsroom. (Bill O'leary - The Washington Post)

In some respects, Al Jazeera English will be worlds apart from its established, decade-old sibling. Al-Jazeera focuses primarily on news of the Middle East, for an audience of mostly Arabic-speaking Muslims. AJE will have broader horizons, aiming to draw a billion-plus English speakers from Madagascar to Maine -- for Muslims, yes, but also for anyone else who wants another perspective on the day's news.

In other words, AJE -- based in the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar -- is hoping to become the first non-Western source to challenge the global info-supremacy of CNN and the BBC. This, although it's not yet available over broadcast frequencies in the United States.

AJE has established four news hubs -- in Washington, Qatar, London and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- around which its 24-hour broadcast will revolve. It also has positioned many of its 500-plus journalists outside of traditional news centers in Europe and North America, in a necklace of bureaus spanning Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East (until last week, the channel was known as Al Jazeera International; the name was changed at the eleventh hour to distinguish it from al-Jazeera, which reaches viewers in several dozen countries).

Marash describes something high-minded and almost stolid. Conflict in the Middle East will make it on the air, but so will water-rights battles in India or labor disputes in Mexico. "Our pace will be slower," he says. "My motto is, 'News at the speed of thought.' "

It's "liberating," he adds, "to be freed of the blonde-of-the-month story."

AJE's viewers will see some Arab faces -- Marash's co-anchor in Washington is Lebanese-born Ghida Fakhry -- but the network has a significant cadre of non-Arabs, too. (Marash's wife, Amy, who previously worked at MSNBC, is an AJE producer.)

Its biggest name, Sir David Frost, will host a weekly public-affairs program. Former CNN and BBC journalist Riz Kahn will head up a Larry King-style talk show and a longer interview program from Washington. AJE's military-affairs analyst is Josh Rushing, a former Marine Corps captain who served as a military public affairs liaison at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha at the start of the Iraq war.

"I don't think we will see another start-up like [this] in my lifetime," says Will Stebbins, 40, chief of the channel's 125-person Washington bureau and a former foreign correspondent for Associated Press Television News.

That is not to suggest that AJE and al-Jazeera are independent operations. Managers say the channels will share such resources as news crews and footage. And more important, both are funded by the same source, Qatar's emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

By some Western media accounts, the emir has sunk more than $1 billion of Qatar's oil and natural-gas wealth into AJE's launch. Although that amount is difficult to confirm -- and AJE's cramped and spartan offices in downtown Washington show little evidence of big spending -- the news-gathering operation doesn't appear to be starved for resources.

Yet while AJE's close association with al-Jazeera might turn out to be its calling card with English-speaking Muslims around the world, it has become its biggest liability in the United States. Despite more than a year of trying, the network has been unable to persuade a single U.S. or Canadian cable or satellite TV system to carry it.