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“The right-wing media and politicians are
looking for any opportunity to be critical of the
reporters who are here, whatever their nationality.
I made the misjudgment, which gave them
the opportunity to do so.
“I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi television
feeling that after four months of interviewing
hundreds of them it was only professional
courtesy to give them a few comments.
“That was my Waterloo – bang!
“ . . . I’m not here to be a superstar. I have been
there in 1991 and could never be bigger than that.
“Some reporters make judgments but that is
not my style. I present both sides and report
what I see with my own eyes.
“I don’t blame NBC for their decision because
they came under great commercial pressure
from the outside.
“And I certainly don’t believe the White House
was responsible for my sacking.
“But I want to tell the story as best as I can,
which makes it so disappointing to be fired.”
Crime and punishment
WHAT was Peter’s crime? Speaking what he
believed to be true on Iraq TV. NBC’s not just
punishing him. The network is punishing us
because his reporting is needed now more than
ever. NBC recently canned Phil Donahue, in part
producers said, for having on too many anti-war
guests and it was not about to put up with more
corporate unappreciated unauthorized points of
view like Peter’s. Especially when their competitor
Fox News, whom they are trying to clone and
beat in the ratings, began bombing Arnett with
ideological ordnance of its own.
Once NBC canned him, most of the US media
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fell in line praising the decision and, as The
Guardian put it, “rounding” on him. Doug Ireland
offers an assessment on TomPaine.com:
“What provoked Arnett’s defenestration? In an
interview he accorded on Sunday to Iraqi television
(which an MSNBC spokesperson initially
described as a ‘professional courtesy’), Arnett
allowed as how media reports of civilian casualties
in Iraq ‘help’ the ‘growing challenge to President
Bush about the conduct of the war and also
opposition to the war. The first war plan has
failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are
trying to write another plan.’
“The Americans don’t want the independent
journalists in Iraq.”
Of course, these are rather common sense
observations of the sort that can be read daily in
the pages of our newspapers, and which even
find their way onto U.S. television. Yet when NBC
snatched the mike from Arnett’s hands, on Monday
morning CNN’s Jeff Greenfield rushed to
endorse the veteran war correspondent’s firing.
Greenfield dismissed the notion of an anti-war
movement whose challenge was ‘growing’ – as if
the millions who have taken to the streets of
major U.S. cities and the some 5,000 American
civil disobedients who have so far been voluntarily
arrested in ‘die-ins’ and other nonviolent
forms of political action – part of the rising
crescendo of protest on a scale not seen since
the Vietnam war – were not energized by the
heart- rending accounts of civilians shredded by
American bombs and bullets in an unnecessary
and obtusely run war.
Greenfield accused Arnett of pro-Iraqi “propaganda.”
That was sad to me in light of my once
tight ‘pal-ship’ with Jeff, and the way in which
this view seems to be shared by so many in the