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)

"Al-Jazeera is one of the most positive and significant cultural events in the Arab world in centuries," he declares. Unlike state-controlled media throughout the Arab world, he says, al-Jazeera regularly broadcasts dissent and opposing points of view, providing "the broadest spectrum of argument" that many Arab viewers have seen.

"Do they broadcast hate speech?" he asks. "Yes, they do. Is it put in context and is it discussed as hate speech? Yes, it is. Hate speech is part of the dialogue of the Middle East. To censor or to exclude it would be to lose all credibility" among al-Jazeera's viewers, he says.

Riz Kahn says the principal U.S. objection to al-Jazeera is that it has been too frank in its reporting on American military power, but he contends that holding the powerful to account is nothing to be ashamed of. American news channels tend to "show the missiles taking off," Kahn says. "Al-Jazeera shows them landing."

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In broadcasting circles, Marash has credibility to burn -- a newsman's newsman with a long, varied and solid reporting career.

Koppel says Marash's "wildly eclectic" interests and free-ranging curiosity made him an ideal jack-of-all-trades as a "Nightline" reporter. "Jazz, sports, international affairs, politics -- you name it, he could do it," Koppel says. "He's really smart, a good writer and a good performer. Other than that, I don't know what's not to like."

Marash has been a news guy since 1957, breaking in as newsreader on a radio station in White Plains, N.Y. He's been a local anchor, a network reporter and a sportscaster -- as well as a foreign correspondent with so much experience that he's lost count of how many countries he's reported from.

Marash also has inspired a second generation of broadcasters. MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann said the newsman was "a revelation" to him when he was growing up in the early 1970s and Marash was doing sports in New York.

"Then they had him co-anchor the news in a completely deconstructed environment, inside the actual newsroom, in shirtsleeves, his lit cigar in the ashtray next to him," Olbermann says by e-mail. "And yet it was still credible and professional. [It] helped show me you didn't have to be a mannequin to do the news."

Marash spent part of his childhood in Richmond, where his father, Jack, ran a Jewish community center and befriended a tennis coach named Sam Woods. The two men worked to overturn regulations that kept Richmond's parks segregated -- enabling a young Woods protege named Arthur Ashe to compete against some of the city's best players. "It's literally true to say Arthur would not have been Arthur without my dad," Marash says of Ashe, who would become the first African American to win Wimbledon.

Marash sees a connection six decades later. As a Jew in an Arab-centric organization, he's an outsider. And some have questioned what he's doing there.

"People label you a self-hating Jew, a traitor to Israel and Judaism," he says. "It's hurtful but dismissible. I don't see them as credible critics. They are articulating a prejudgment instead of exercising their curiosity."

Pause.

"It makes me angry more than it pains me," he says. "I know it's illegitimate. Who arrogated the power to them to know what's inside of someone else? Anybody who knows me knows I'm not ashamed of my religion."

Al-Jazeera, he says, "has consistently offered a window of opportunity for Israel and Israeli citizens to speak to the Arab world. There is no contradiction between Judaism and al-Jazeera. As a Jew, I have always wished for and worked toward peace and civility in the Palestinian territories and Israel."

He thinks he's learned a lesson from all this, something approaching wisdom. "The meta message is a humbling one, which is that no one knows it all," he says. "The more you know and understand how others see the world, the better you understand the world."