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In August last year I blogged,

Marine spokesman in Al Jazeera documentary silenced, may retire: Marine Lt. Josh Rushing was impressive in Control Room, the documentary about the Al Jazeera satellite TV channel's staff in Baghdad as they cover the Iraq war. The thoughtful, articulate, young spokesman and Public Information Officer couldn't have represented us better to the world if he had come from central casting rather than Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

(If you haven't seen Control Room, which has already passed through theaters, try to find it when it comes out on cable or DVD. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, it's a real documentary, without attitude.)...

Now Josh Rushing has taken a job with the Washington bureau of Al-Jazeera's upcoming English-language channel, slated to begin broadcasting in the spring.

From an interview with Time this week (Al Jazeera Hires an Ex-Marine):

...The target audience, Rushing says (while recording our interview on his iPod) is global, English-speaking and owns iPods -- people who have turned off the TV news in favor of the Internet.

Rushing says he looked into the accusations about Al Jazeera distorting the news, and found nothing to stop him from joining. "I'm not condoning everything they do but the Arab media is a key part of national security and how to deal with Arab world. The network has long been the only one in the region with a point-counterpoint approach, where many others are 'point-point-point.' Al Jazeera, for example regularly has Israeli spokespeople on." Rushing says the State Department and Pentagon have both shown interest in working with the new network.

Rushing thinks part of his mission is to educate the American public on the reality of war. "War in America has its own branding—it's the American flag, it's that Lee Greenwood song, it's a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square. But Americans need to be aware of the consequences." ...

Certainly Al Jazeera's video crews can move more freely in Iraq than American reporters, so we're likely to see more war footage than on CNN. It's a fascinating challenge and opportunity for Rushing to bridge news cultures -- and the former Marine spokesman's very presence on the network boosts its credibility at launch.

USA Today's story (Former Marine in media glare as he joins Al-Jazeera) presses Rushing on what some may see as "collaboration." It's worth a read.

More links about Rushing are on the August 2004 blog item; scroll down just below it for a sidebar on Control Room's filmmaker, Egyptian-born Harvard graduate Jehane Noujaim. Rushing was assigned to work with her because CENTCOM in Iraq thought this was merely a student film and assigned it to the junior staffer.

Here's Control Room's movie site, and an interesting 2001 story (In defense of al-Jazeera)about the origins of the Qatar-based network, cobbled together from the ashes of the BBC's Arabic Service, by Michael Moran, senior producer for special projects at MSNBC.com. He worked as the BBC’s U.S. affairs analyst in London from 1993-96 and shared a newsroom with the Arab journalists at the BBC.

Also, if you want to hear Rushing speak, last October NPR interviewed him: Josh Rushing's Surprise Role in 'Control Room'

Was this a paid obit? The Telegraph (U.K.) writes a brutal obit that begins mildly enough:

M Scott Peck, who has died aged 69, was a psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Travelled, the ultimate self-help manual, which has sold some 10 million copies and which set a record for a nonfiction book by spending more than eight years on the New York Times bestseller list.

The unsigned obit gets personal after this. (Who knew that much unflattering stuff about him, and disliked him enough to put it in his life story?) Here's how it ends:

...Latterly he suffered from impotence and Parkinson's Disease and devoted himself to Christian songwriting, at which he was not very good.

He married Lily Ho in 1959; they had three children, two of whom would not talk to their father. She left him in 2003. He is survived by his second wife, Kathy, an educationalist he picked up, while still married, after a lecture at Sacramento, and by his children.

For comparison, here's his New York Times obit.

Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain. Photo at the link.

Finally, in the rush of hurricane blogging last week, I failed to thank CNN/Netscape for making this blog an "Editor's Web Pick" in a sidebar to much of its own coverage. (See the sidebar here, for instance.) Hundreds of new readers arrived here as a result. I think what drew their attention was my searching Google, on a hunch, for a map of the Gulf oil rigs, and finding one that also plotted Rita's path through it. Whatever, it was nice to be "discovered."

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