So Dave Marash admits he quit Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish after being bumped out of the anchor chair and on to the road. Not exactly how he first explained it. Still, we all have our amour propre, what is inter­est­ing in the CJR piece is his ana­lysis of the shift­ing polit­ics of Qatar (my links in the copy below):

I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice Pres­id­ent Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the pos­sib­il­ity of action against Iran.

And instead of get­ting acqui­es­cence, the United States got defi­ance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basic­ally went off on their own and the first sort of major break­through on that was the Mecca agree­ment, which defied the Amer­ican for­eign policy by let­ting Hamas into the tent of the gov­ernance of the Palestinian territories.

This enraged the State Depart­ment and was one crys­tal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off cam­pus, was off on its own.

And it is around this time, and I think not coin­cid­ent­ally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal fam­ily of Qatar start­ing to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jaz­eera Arabic and Eng­lish a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stor­ies that were boos­t­er­ish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia.

And you start to see stor­ies of ana­lysis in the New York Times where regional people are not­ing that Al Jaz­eera seems to be chan­ging its edit­or­ial stance toward Saudi Arabia.

I’m sug­gest­ing that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jaz­eera] that simply fol­low­ing the Amer­ican polit­ical lead­er­ship and the Amer­ican polit­ical ideal of global, uni­ver­sal­ist val­ues car­ried out in an abso­lutely pure, mul­ti­polar, First Amend­ment global con­ver­sa­tion, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region.

And I think part of get­ting right with the region was slightly chan­ging the edit­or­ial ambi­tion of Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish, and I think it has sub­sequently become a more nar­rowly focused, more uni­vocal chan­nel than was ori­gin­ally conceived.