A former U.S. Marine who has taken a job with the Arabic al-Jazeera television network says he hopes to show Muslims the United States he knows and loves.

ADVERTISEMENT

Texas-born Josh Rushing, 33, will appear on a global, English-language news channel the network hopes to start by spring, and told USA Today he considers his decision to work for the Qatar-based network noble.

"What the Marines trained me to do was to represent the best of what America stands for to a foreign audience. That's exactly what I'm going to do," he said.

Exactly what Rushing will be doing remains undecided, but it probably will involve a combination of in-studio work and field reporting.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said the network is "perfectly willing to lie to the world" and has "a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again" for its 50 million viewers, most of them in the Arab world.

In its latest hiring phase, network spokeswoman Katie Bergius said al-Jazeera has hired reporters and producers from such Western competitors as the Associated Press, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcast Corp., CNBC, CNN and Fox News.