Al-Jazeera's American Accent

There is only one U.S. Marine in my Rolodex, and he can be found under the letter "R": Captain Josh Rushing. A telephone number follows, though I don't know if it's still in service. Certainly Mr. Rushing is no longer in service, at least as far as the Marines are concerned. He is now a reporter for Al-Jazeera English, and the face of Middle America in the Middle East.

Mr. Rushing entered a lot of Rolodexes in 2004 after the release of the documentary "Control Room," in which he appeared as a spokesman for CentCom while stationed in Qatar during the early days of the Iraq war. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, if unsophisticated, he was a refreshing contrast to the androids-in-fatigues usually wheeled out by the Pentagon to hurl jargon at reporters.

Mr. Rushing was willing to state that the civilian deaths shown on Al-Jazeera horrified him, and drew a parallel between Al-Jazeera and Fox News, saying that both stations played to the patriotic expectations of their target audiences.

Wittingly or not, Mr. Rushing had entered a zone of moral relativism or uncertainty — which is attractive in the cinema and anathema to the military — and his journalistic star rose as rapidly as his military one fell. Critics, gearing up for the divinely ordained overthrow of President Bush in the 2004 presidential election, gushed over the film's unlikely hero. Requests for interviews followed, but Mr. Rushing was silenced by his superior officers. Eventually he left the Marines and the drab world of five-figure salaries to join the Al-Jazeera offshoot, Al-Jazeera English. He has now produced enough reports (available on YouTube and through his Web site, www.joshrushing.com) to give us a sense of what he's up to.

Is he an important figure? I think he is. Although Al-Jazeera's absence from American airwaves renders him nearly invisible here, the channel's popularity makes him a considerable factor in the rest of the world. His book, "Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World," will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in June, and American fascination with Arab media continues to grow. Tonight, the Museum of Television and Radio is hosting a panel discussion, "The War of Information in the Middle East," the first in a three-part series to focus on the region. ("Women, the Media, and the Middle East," moderated by Barbara Walters, will be held on April 19, and "Covering the World: Al Jazeera," on May 3).

On Al-Jazeera English, Mr. Rushing's role is to play an ordinary, earnest, patriotic Texan who has seen the light about his government's foreign policy — what Gore Vidal mockingly calls "perpetual war for perpetual peace" — and mended his ways accordingly. On air, he makes a point of referring to his past as a Marine, to his complicity in insisting on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and he presents himself as a humble man still in the process of deprogramming himself so that he can report the news rather than spin it. But there is no doubt that, spin or no spin, the subjects he selects tend to present America in an unflattering light.

Mr. Rushing's ventures in longform reportage (a specialty of the channel) include "Hollywood: Casting the Enemy," about the image of Arabs in American movies, with a particular focus on their roles as villains. "Spin: The Art of Selling War," is a slick piece of counter-spin that paints every American military venture since Vietnam (with the possible exception of Kosovo) as based on lies, lies, and more damned lies. "The Other Washington" is a painfully aimless essay about an unemployed young African-American in Anacostia, a dangerous Washington D.C. neighborhood; finally, there's "Vanished," about Aban Elias, an Iraqi-American civil engineer who returned to Baghdad to help rebuild the country after its liberation, only to be kidnapped in mysterious circumstances. He remains missing (there was no ransom demand, nor any tape of his death), and Mr. Rushing suggests that the American government doesn't care about him because he is a Muslim and Arab-American as opposed to, say, Daniel Pearl.

None of these 15- to 20-minute documentaries is particularly well shaped or argued (although "Spin: The Art of Selling War" is cleverly asserted), and it seems unlikely they'd make the cut on CNN, regardless of their viewpoint. Yet Mr. Rushing's good press has only increased since he became a reporter. In a recent New York Observer profile, he was dubbed a "matinee idol," a "hunk of war," and — absurdly — compared to Peter Jennings, who was by far the most articulate network anchor in America until his death from lung cancer in 2005.

The segment about the role of Arabs in Hollywood movies includes interviews with actors Tony Shalhoub, Omar Sharif, Chris Maher, and Alexander Sadiq, among others. Overall, it's quite evenhanded, in part because several actors point out that, particularly since the attack on the World Trade Center, Hollywood has increasingly offered Arabs sympathetic parts and tried to make them more three-dimensional, even when they're cast as villains. But Mr. Rushing seems to believe that merely depicting a terrorist in a film is de facto to engage in "negative stereotyping." If this is truly a problem, then the only solution would be to eliminate all terrorists from films, and perhaps villains also.

When it was first announced that Mr. Rushing had signed up with Al-Jazeera, Fox's Sean Hannity reportedly posted a picture of him on screen with the word "Traitor" printed above it. In fact, Mr. Rushing seems willing to toy with the notion, at least for marketing purposes. On the cover of his forthcoming autobiography, he is photographed, unshaven, wearing a keffiyeh — a titillating suggestion that this former Marine has gone over to the other side.

But the lesson of Al-Jazeera English — for now, anyway — is that there are no sides, only an endless array of viewpoints. Some happen to be more fashionable than others, of course, and are more likely to sell books.