The Firing of Peter Arnett

On March 19, shortly after Saddam Hussein defied President Bush's deadline to go into exile, Tom Brokaw of NBC broke into Law & Order, airing on the East Coast, to announce the start of bombing. Al Jazeera provided the initial visuals. By phone, Brokaw spoke with Peter Arnett in Baghdad, on assignment for National Geographic television. As the night wore on, NBC was only too eager to claim Arnett as its own.

But Arnett's star turn was short-lived; within two weeks he was dismissed for saying that the coalition's initial war plan was not working. That he said this--and more--on "state controlled" Iraqi television seems beside the point. All Iraqi television is state-controlled. And had Arnett said this on a privately owned network elsewhere, it still could have been beamed around the world.

Arnett may have stated the obvious, but his interview was insensitive (four journalists were missing when he praised the work of the Iraqi Information Industry) and unnecessary, given all the reporting he had to do. But it fell far short of a fireable offense. The behavior of NBC, which initially supported his Iraq appearance, was hardly a profile in courage. The losers in all this, of course, were viewers, deprived of reporting from the only US-based television correspondent remaining in Baghdad.

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