“People believe three things about [Al-Jazeera],” Josh Rushing told a crowd of about fifty observers. “They say that it shows beheadings, it has a website called aljazeera.com and it is the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.”
Rushing, a former U.S. Marine and current military and current affairs correspondent for Al-Jazeera English, combatted the misconceptions of the Al-Jazeera network in Western media last Tuesday night in the Leavey Center. The lecture was presented by the Lecture Fund and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
Rushing, who has appeared on new shows including CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” and FOX’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” rebutted each of these points with examples from his experience with the network. Although many believe the network aired the infamous footage of Daniel Pearl’s beheading in Pakistan in 2002, Rushing explained that, like every major news network in America, Al-Jazeera showed only the first few minutes of the tape, before the actual beheading occurred.
“All Arab news organizations are seen as one and the same. The messenger and the message become interchangeable,” Visiting Researcher to the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Adel T. Iskandar said. “For airing the videos of bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri, Al-Jazeera became misconstrued as the mouthpiece of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban although this very footage was broadcast on western stations as well.”
Iskandar has taught courses on Arab communications and transnational media systems. He is the author of Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism.
Between 35 and 50 million Arabs watch the station, which is the fifth best-recognized brand name and currently fastest-growing news station in the world, he said.
“It clearly was more than just a channel; it was the engine that was driving debate,” Rushing said. He claimed to have heard discussion revolving around recent Al-Jazeera news items everywhere he walked in the Middle East.
“Outside of the mosque, this may be the largest shaper of opinion in the region,” he said.
Two years ago, the 14-year military veteran decided to resign from his position as Captain in the Marines, losing all of his health care benefits, to become a spokesperson for Al-Jazeera. The change came after Rushing was secretly taped providing American news to the Arab network in the 2004 documentary Control Room.
The subsequent media attention brought upon Rushing after the documentary was released inspired him to begin speaking out about American treatment of the channel.
“The press tagged me as the new face of Al-Jazeera, and that’s when the death threats started coming in,” Rushing said. “I actually just sent a few over to the FBI today.”
“Al-Jazeera has introduced a brand of alternative news that distinguishes itself from other global media organizations,” Iskandar said. “Prior to Al-Jazeera English, most international news was presented from a Western perspective in mind and from Western media offices.”
Rushing lamented what he called the declining quality of American broadcast journalism, referencing the hundreds of collective hours spent covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the overabundance of Paris Hilton in the media.
“Why is America the only place in the world that doesn’t get international news?” Rushing asked the audience. He utilized the analogy of bricks falling from the wall of isolationism that America has built, beginning with the attacks on 9/11.
“His points on how isolation is obviously not working in America were very creatively expressed,” Ben Lavon (COL ’11) said. “He provided a new perspective on how the world perceives media and brought up very valid issues of how America is the only nation without international news.”
