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children being killed like this, but we had no
choice.”
Past is not past
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
IT was in search for context that I reached back
into a book on my shelf, “The Powers That Be,”
by the great Vietnam War reporter David Halberstam.
In it, he writes of two incidents. The
first occurred in the spring of l965, a spring like
the one we are living with. Two journalists for
the Associated Press, a wire service that specializes
in playing it straight down the middle,
reported that the US was using poison gas. The
reporters had multiple sources. There was a big
flap. President Lyndon Johnson personally went
on TV to deny it. The Military was enraged.
Another story appeared by one of the same
reporters on the bombing of a village with a
great cost of civilian lives. The military was
really pissed off by that one because it quoted an
American lieutenant who said, famously, “we
bombed the village in order to save it.”
“That quote in many ways defined the war, and
is its defining epitaph. The reporter on both stories
was one Peter Arnett.
Halberstam wrote that reporters like Arnett
were never invited on the Sunday talk shows
because networks like CBS considered themselves
a consensus medium. “In the early days,
much of the film seemed to center on action
rather than the more substantitive qualities of
the war. An emphasis on what the television correspondents
for CBS themselves called ‘bloody’
or ‘bang-bang.’ There was a group of younger
correspondents who felt that that somehow the
network was always managing to sanitize the
war.”
148
How far have we come? By l991, Peter Arnett
said he had covered 17 wars. Now, he is fighting
one of his own.
The resurrection and
crucifixion of Peter Arnett
LAST week, TV Guide ran a column on the resurrection
of Peter Arnett. It discussed how this
Pulitzer Prize winning one-time AP reporter outraged
the American right-wing for his reporting
during Gulf War I but was getting it right this
time. No sooner had the piece appeared than
Peter’s resurrection imploded, turning into
another crucifixion, perhaps a self-crucifixion.
One minute the man was on top, reporting every
other minute from Baghdad, the envy of all the
networks who couldn’t or wouldn’t have their
own man in the hot spot. The next minute, he
was being run out of town on a rail, fired, disgraced,
and apologizing all over the TODAY
show for his “misjudgment.” (He has since been
hired by the Daily Mirror in London, which features
as its headline today: “Fired By America
for Telling the Truth.” Arnett writes he has not
apologized for what he said.)
What Arnett says now
WRITING in the Mirror, Arnett explains his
stance: “I am still in shock and awe at being fired.
There is enormous sensitivity within the US government
to reports coming out from Baghdad.
“They don’t want credible news organizations
reporting from here because it presents them
with enormous problems . . .
“I’m not angry. I’m not crying. But I’m also
awed by this media phenomenon.