Dave Marash is a Washington-based anchor for Al Jazeera English, joining the network from ABC’s Nightline. Before Nightline, Marash spent more than a decade in local news and sports, and worked at ABC’s 20/20 and CBS Radio. Marash won an Overseas Press Club Award for his 1972 radio reports on the Munich Olympic Games terrorist attack. He is a Williams College graduate.
1. TVNewser: One year after its launch, Al Jazeera English is:
Marash: Exactly what it said it would be: a straight-up, international news channel, which goes at a slightly slower pace, doing fewer stories, but doing them with more depth and context, reporting especially from the places (South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia) more conventional news channels largely ignore, and ignoring many of the inconsequential stories (the adventures of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and O.J. Simpson, for examples) our competitors seem to thrive on.
2. TVNewser: Thoughts on the ‘new’ Nightline:
Marash: For 25 years Ted Koppel‘s Nightline gave its audience uniquely ambitious and detailed reports on the most important stories in the news. Working there for 16 years was an unbelievable opportunity. Today’s Nightline, on many of its broadcasts, no longer looks unique, ambitious, detailed or devoted to news which is really important.
3. TVNewser: As a journalist, working for Al Jazeera is…
Marash: Very rewarding, because our mix of rolling news and documentary has allowed me to do coverage of breaking stories as they happen, and longer-form reports that feature the breadth, depth and context behind the news. It’s also rewarding to be involved in a cutting-edge project that is changing both the agenda and the flow of global journalism presenting often-overlooked stories and points of view from every point of the compass.
It is frustrating of course, to be cut off from so much of the American audience, although every week our Internet audience (about 60% of it American) continues to grow, and I’m confident we will soon be seen on many U.S. cable and satellite systems.
4. TVNewser: My reflections on covering the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist killings:
Marash: For somebody who was already working both news and sports beats, it was a shock, but not a surprise, when “the real world” invaded the Olympics. Still, to see an event which still in 1972 was, for most of its participants, a very idealistic enterprise, polluted by criminal violence in the name of politics was incredibly painful. The International Olympic Committee’s decision to continue the Games for some 6 excruciating hours, over the objections of many of the athletes, even as a deadly attack on their fellow Olympians was proceeding, was one of the most heartless actions I’ve ever witnessed. But again, that was no surprise. These were many of the very same folks who had awarded both the Winter and Summer Games of 1936 to Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
5. TVNewser: My favorite moment as a sports reporter was…
Marash: At the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics, I watched as an unranked Japanese outsider won the ski jump event. No one who was there, who watched the wicker snow fences terraced along the jump site bulge as fans pushed forward for both his takeoffs, is ever likely to forget it. There’s no doubt, some kind of collective human energy propelled this jumper, whose name I couldn’t tell you for a million bucks, not only yards beyond his best previous effort, but to the first Gold Medal ever won at a Winter Games by an athlete from Japan. As they say, the joint was jumping. What a break for me to be there!