A decade ago, retired U.S. Marine and current Al Jazeera English journalist Josh Rushing’slife looked significantly different. Rushing frequently served as an interview subject representing the Corps during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a position he describes as “selling the war.”
“I would now call it ‘casting’ without much sense of irony,” Rushing said of his selection as a spokesperson. “I was cast for the position. I was a young Marine. I had a certain look. I had a young family. I fit exactly the bill they were looking for.”
During his time in Doha, Qatar, Rushing developed close relationships with journalists from a network with which the U.S. was not yet familiar: Al Jazeera.
“It turns out that on the base, no one spoke Arabic. There were just no Arabs on the base at all, until we set up this media center and Al Jazeera came and set up an office. So I'd go by every day, and ask them for a new word, and they'd teach me a new word,” Rushing told KGOU’s World Views. "I'd go by the next day and use it, and get a new word. And I started to sit and eat lunch with them.”
Soon, his relationship with the Middle Eastern news network deepened as he became disenchanted with the United States’ lack of engagement.
“It was the only network in the Middle East, 24/7, Arabic-speaking news, that challenged governments and was broadcast on satellites,” Rushing said. “So governments couldn't stop it from coming in. It was free to air. It was unparalleled in its influence in driving the debate.”
After working together with a former BBC journalist to begin Al Jazeera’s English-language branch, Rushing now spends more time in the U.S., investigating a variety of issues for his Emmy-winning program Fault Lines.
“The U.S. should have been more engaged. The battle of ideas that was happening on Al Jazeera could have been more important on any given day than any battle that was happening on the ground in Iraq,” he contended.
Rushing doesn’t limit his scope to the Middle East. The Lewisville, Texas native has done four Fault Lines episodes on Oklahoma issues - focusing on nursing home abuse, the death penalty, elderly imprisonment, and the political battle to acknowledge a connection between seismic activity and the oil and gas industry.
“I find myself in Oklahoma a lot--probably an inordinate amount for an international journalist,” Rushing said. “But my show tells stories about America. A lot of times those stories are abroad. They're in Iraq and Afghanistan and Mexico and Colombia. But, you know, most of the time they're here. They're here in the heartland, so I tell these stories.”
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INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On acting as a military media spokesman
We had set up a media center built by a Hollywood set designer, to look super high-speed and professional. We were in the desert; there were dunes all around outside the base. We could do interviews outside. It looked like we were right there. We never said we were right there. It said we were at Doha, but most people just say "you're in the Middle East, that's the war," even though you're three countries away from the war. There was no way that a reporter was going to grill a young troop at war, and so we went out every day with a new message of the day, and we hit every single news show. Looking back on that, I think that is not only unethical, wrong, probably illegal, if someone really looked into it, but just dangerous for our nation to use the military in that way. There's a reason the military has good credibility, and it's because it's not political.
On his award-winning show Fault Lines
A classic "Fault Lines" is-- We tend to look at where the power structure is. We find the people that we feel like are in some kind of disadvantaged situation, and we go and we interview them. We try to figure out what that system is, and we try to hold someone accountable. And that's a very rewarding type of journalism to do. It's expensive. It takes a long time. It's investigative. And that kind of journalism is going away in America, because it's easier to put two people in a studio. I think there's a real problem in America, because of the profit imperative with American television news, that it's already morphed from journalism to media and media to entertainment. That leads to an electorate that is not well-informed, and to have a democracy, we have to have a well-informed electorate.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Josh Rushing, welcome to World Views.
JOSH RUSHING: Thanks for having me.
GRILLOT: Well, Josh, you've got a lot going on in your career, and you've had a lot of amazing experience. Let's just start, though, with your original assignment, when you were in the Marine Corps and you were part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is kind of where the book begins, and I'd like to just start at the beginning. Tell us about your job there, which I understand was to sell the war to the American public. Tell us how that happened.
RUSHING: "Selling the war" is a phrase and a description that I only use now, looking back at it. Being hand-selected, because I was a good Marine, for that position-- How I saw it then, I would now call it "casting" without much sense of irony. I was cast for the position. I was a young Marine. I had a certain look. I had a young family. I fit exactly the bill they were looking for, for what ended up being, essentially, a two-pronged approach to sell the war. That was out of the White House Office of Global Communications. There was a high approach, and a low approach. The high approach -- they needed someone with the greatest credibility they could find in the Bush administration, which wasn't much at the time, but they had one, one person who had high approval numbers. And that was Colin Powell. So he was selected to give the speech in February 2003 at the UN, and make the argument. That was the high approach. The low approach was, we need someone in the news every day that had unimpeachable character. And where do you find that? In the U.S. military. So they cast a handful of people to be spokespeople for U.S. Central Command. And then they took-- there was a colonel named Ray Shepherd, who had been in the Air Force for 28 years. They displaced him with a young White House staffer who had been on the Bush campaign named Jim Wilkinson. He was 32, I think. They gave him the civilian rank of a two star general, and called him the Communications Czar. And he would get the messages of the day from the White House Office of Global Communications. We'd have a morning meeting, and he would give us what the message of the day was going to be. We would go out to reporters-- reporters would say, "What's your message today?" and we would tell them. So they'd say "okay, I'll ask you this, I'll ask you that, and then we'll wrap." And then we would sell the war that way. Because the truth is, if you ask a young Marine officer "why are you going to invade Iraq?" it's the exact same answer that an old Marine general can give you. There's literally only one legal answer they can give you. We don't pick and choose our wars. The only reason the Marines would invade anywhere is if the Commander in Chief orders us to. And if he doesn't, we won't. It doesn't matter if we agree with it or don't agree with it; think it's a good war, a winnable war, a right war-- none of that matters. It's only if he orders it. And if he doesn't, we don't do it. The system's set up that way so that someone that faces accountability with the people has to make that decision, defend that decision, and then be accountable for it via elections. But they have to round that, because they had such low credibility at the White House at the time, by using those members in the military, namely me. So when I would do an interview--I could give Fox a hard time here, but let's go with MSNBC. When I would do an interview on MSNBC, with the reporter, the strap on the screen would say, "Our hearts are with you," and a yellow ribbon. Do you think he's going to ask me tough questions about the WMD evidence that I'm saying--that's why we're going to invade, you don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud? Do you think he's going to grill me on that, or challenge me on that? Of course not. His boss' heart is with me. His audience's heart is with me. I'm the young troop at war, even though I was in Doha, hundreds of miles away from Iraq. We had set up a media center built by a Hollywood set designer, to look super high-speed and professional. We were in the desert; there were dunes all around outside the base. We could do interviews outside. It looked like we were right there. We never said we were right there. It said we were at Doha, but most people just say "you're in the Middle East, that's the war," even though you're three countries away from the war. There was no way that a reporter was going to grill a young troop at war, and so we went out every day with a new message of the day, and we hit every single news show. Looking back on that, I think that is not only unethical, wrong, probably illegal, if someone really looked into it, but just dangerous for our nation to use the military in that way. There's a reason the military has good credibility, and it's because it's not political.
GRILLOT: None of this is really new, is it? I mean, in the sense that controlling the message, making sure that you're spinning stories, propagandizing-- I mean, this is basically what it is. You don't want to lose control of that message, right? So you want to make sure you're getting at what it is you want to get out. But you also used that opportunity to engage with the local community, with those that were trying to work with, and perhaps even against. And this led to some interesting relationships that you developed, and the creation of Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera English, which of course is quite controversial. You got in the middle of all that. How did you go from being this spokesperson and delivering the message of the day, to creating some sort of really incredible new institution that still lives on today?
RUSHING: In the most mundane way you can imagine. I wanted to learn Arabic, because I was in the region. It turns out that on the base, no one spoke Arabic. There were just no Arabs on the base at all, until we set up this media center and Al Jazeera came and set up an office. So I'd go by every day, and ask them for a new word, and they'd teach me a new word. I'd go by the next day and use it, and get a new word. And I started to sit and eat lunch with them, and there came a point that these few spokespeople were actually overwhelmed by how many media were there. So they kind of broke up some of the major ones into accounts, to kind of make sure they didn't fall through the cracks. When they said "okay, Fox News," all the hands went up. When they said "Al Jazeera," my boss said, "you know Rushing, you've got a pretty good relationship with those guys. Why don't you do it?" Which is fine--I took it as a sign of trust in me, right? But the problem is, from a national standpoint, from a strategic standpoint, is I didn't speak Arabic. I'm not an expert in the region. I was one of the junior officers there. Are you kidding me? That's going to be the face of America on Al Jazeera? You clearly don't understand what it is. And they didn't. Because around the same time, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, came out saying that they show beheadings. Demonstrably false. They had never shown a beheading in the history of the network. Absolutely untrue, and easy to prove untrue. He said "well, they're the mouthpiece of Bin Laden." Yeah, they did get the tapes from Bin Laden, not because they're the mouthpiece--they didn't show the whole tapes, they showed the important parts, the clips. U.S. media went on to show every one of those clips as well; they would just do it with a "Al Jazeera aired another clip today," then they'd show the whole clip. Bin Laden actually called for attacks against Al-Jazeera, because they wouldn't show his whole tapes, and they wouldn't refer to him as "Mujahideen." And so the reason that he, even at a time when he was calling for attacks against him, continued to get his tapes to them-- There was a reason. And it's the same reason that the U.S. needed to understand, and didn't. If they could get past what Al Jazeera isn't--and this was one of the false things they were saying--they could look at what Al Jazeera actually was. It was the only network in the Middle East, 24/7, Arabic speaking news, that challenged governments and was broadcast on satellites, so governments couldn't stop it from coming in. It was free to air. It was unparalleled in its influence in driving the debate. Unparalleled. I mean, they get numbers like-- 58 million households were tuning in at a time, from Morocco to Eastern Iraq. But the numbers are far greater, because it would be on in every barber shop and hookah lounge. Everywhere you went, it was on, so groups of people were watching it. There's just nothing to compare it to for its influence in the region. The U.S. should have been more engaged. The battle of ideas that was happening on Al Jazeera could have been more important on any given day than any battle that was happening on the ground in Iraq.
GRILLOT: So it sounds to me like you were noticing that there was a great deal of misperception about what Al Jazeera was doing, and you obviously took the perspective of having worked with them, trying to perhaps defend what they were doing. You said there was plenty of evidence to support it. But this ultimately led you down a path that perhaps you didn't expect, right?
RUSHING: --yeah.
GRILLOT: In the sense that you were asked to not speak with them any longer. You were basically removed from your position over this.
RUSHING: So that happened like a year later. And just to make a note: I'm not some lefty. I didn't go to Berkeley. I'm not an Arab-- I don't come from an Arabic family, or an Arab family. I just happened to see it firsthand. I'm a kid from Texas, who went to the University of Texas as an active duty Marine. I'd been a Marine for my entire adult life at that point. I just happened to see it, firsthand. I didn't run into problems there, although I never could get Central Command to engage. I absolutely couldn't. I came back from the war frustrated. A little less than a year later, this documentary film gets released at Sundance about Al Jazeera. I knew nothing about it. Someone saw the movie, called me at my Marine office, and said "Hey, Captain Rushing, you don't know me. I just saw your movie at Sundance and wanted to say thank you." That's how I found out my life was about to change forever. The movie got picked up by Magnolia Films and released across the country. This was exactly the time Abu Ghraib was breaking, and Al Jazeera ran the Abu Ghraib photos, and you had this channel that, in the U.S., was synonymous with Al-Qaeda, and then you had this Marine in the movie that seemed to be sympathetic to Al Jazeera. And so all the media in the country wanted to talk to me. I was covered in the entertainment sections, because of my role in the movie. The Marine Corps said no comment, and wouldn't let me talk about it. I actually had a lot to say about it though, but I knew I would have to resign and walk away from the Corps to do it, which is hard to do as an officer of 14 years. At 20, you get retirement. You get your benefits for the rest of your life and half of your pay for the rest of your life. But if what drove me to be in the Marines in the first place was a sense of civic obligation, then I felt I could do more for my country by walking away, rather than staying in. So I walked away from the Marine Corps so I could talk about Al Jazeera. I did that for many months in the media, living off what I called savings and my wife called a second mortgage. When I finally needed to get a job, a guy from the BBC called me and said he was leaving the BBC to start a new Al Jazeera English. He had seen this movie in London and thought I was interesting. Next thing you know, I'm one of a handful of people hired to launch this channel.
GRILLOT: So it obviously opened new doors; as they say, when one door closes, new doors open. Or the other way around. But it's led you down a path where you've now worked for Al Jazeera English, and then you've also got a new program. So tell us about what you're doing today and how you feel about journalistic ethics and these kinds of issues today, given the climate that we're still in?
RUSHING: Yeah, so I've been Al Jazeera for 12 years, which in the beginning was a turn from being a spokesperson to being a journalist. They put me with some of the best producers you can find in America and put me under their wing, and mentored me. Eventually, I started a show in '09 called "Fault Lines." A couple years ago, we beat "60 Minutes" for the Emmy for Best Investigative Journalism in the U.S., a magazine show. This year, we're nominated for five Emmys. Really proud of that. It looks like a documentary film, each one does, but it follows an investigative journalist trying to uncover something. Recently, we've done episodes about children being poisoned by lead in Cleveland and the city government not doing anything about it. Police abuse with Tasers-- we were on the streets in Ferguson and Baltimore, been in prisons. In Oklahoma, I've done four episodes about nursing home abuse, an investigation about that, about the death penalty in Oklahoma, about elderly imprisonment in Oklahoma, and about the political cover-up with earthquakes in Oklahoma, why it took so long for the state to acknowledge what was causing it. I've been back to Oklahoma to witness an execution in the death chamber here. So I find myself in Oklahoma a lot--probably an inordinate amount for an international journalist. But my show tells stories about America. A lot of times those stories are abroad. They're in Iraq and Afghanistan and Mexico and Colombia. But, you know, most of the time they're here. They're here in the heartland, so I tell these stories. A classic "Fault Lines" is-- We tend to look at where the power structure is. We find the people that we feel like are in some kind of disadvantaged situation, and we go and we interview them. We try to figure out what that system is, and we try to hold someone accountable. And that's a very rewarding type of journalism to do. It's expensive. It takes a long time. It's investigative. And that kind of journalism is going away in America, because it's easier to put two people in a studio. I think there's a real problem in America, because of the profit imperative with American television news, that it's already morphed from journalism to media and media to entertainment. That leads to an electorate that is not well-informed, and to have a democracy, we have to have a well-informed electorate.
GRILLOT: Thank you so much for being here today, Josh, and sharing your story and your perspectives on journalism today. Thank you.
RUSHING: Thank you so much.
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