Marash was born to a Jewish family, his father having been a director of a Jewish Community Center in
Richmond, Virginia. A graduate of
Williams College , Marash worked at
New Brunswick, New Jersey, station
WCTC-AM (1450), where he hosted a nightly talk show,
Dave Marash On Call. He had also been a reporter at
WPIX. He did both news and sports reporting for WCBS Newsradio 88 and WNEW-FM in New York City. He subsequently worked at
WCBS-TV in
New York. Marash was host of
ESPN's
Baseball Tonight and
NBC's
GrandStand, which alternated as a
National Football League pregame show or a sports
anthology series, depending on the season. In the early years of the
Fox television network, Marash hosted a magazine-style show of science and technology entitled
Beyond Tomorrow. He then worked at
ABC News. His last appearance prior to joining Al Jazeera English was on
Nightline. He had anchored newscasts at
WNBC in New York and
WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., during the mid-1980s. He received
Emmy Awards for his
Nightline coverage of the
Oklahoma City bombing and for his coverage of the explosion of
TWA Flight 800. His May 2001
Nightline documentary about singer
Eva Cassidy was one of the highlights of his years with the program. Marash garnered considerable attention when he joined
Al Jazeera English in January 2006 as the network's
Washington, D.C., anchor, thus becoming the de facto American face of the new English-language station. Two years later, in March 2008, he stepped down from his position. Marash explained, "To put it bluntly, the channel that's on now—while excellent, and I plan to be a lifetime viewer—is not the channel that I signed up to do." Specifically, he cited the loss of editorial control and his inability to vouch for content that the network was broadcasting, as reasons for his departure. On February 14, 2011, Marash defended Al Jazeera English on the ''
O'Reilly Factor'' on Fox News against claims by Bill O'Reilly that Al Jazeera was anti-American. He joined
Santa Fe, New Mexico, public radio station
KSFR-FM 101.1 in March 2014 as co–news director. Since September 2014, he has hosted the radio show and podcast
Here & There: a four-times-weekly series of 50-minute news interviews. ==Notes==