UPDATED - ColdType

media mainstream. Yesterday I parried on the
issue with Bill Himmelfarb of the Washington
Times on Keano’s interview program on Cape
Talk Radio in South Africa. (I seem to get on the
air in South Africa more than in South Jersey.)
Bill was blasting Arnett for what he called anti-
American coverage during Gulf War I.
Arnett’s bias
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
TO refute this canard, I cited some of my own
research based on a book by Major General
Perry Smith’s, “How CNN fought the War.” Smith
who now comments for CBS said he originally
came on board, in his mind, to counter-balance
Arnett’s “misleading coverage. I was trying to
figure out Peter Arnett,” he writes. “Was he
biased in favor of the Iraqi government? Was he
an anti-war advocate? Was he fundamentally
anti-American?”
This TV General for hire decided that he was
not ideological after all, “The more I watched the
Arnett coverage, the more I talked to people who
knew him well, the more I came to believe he
was a ‘feeler.’ In other words, Arnett is someone
who empathizes with the people around him.”
First the sentencing, then the trial
LEWIS CARROL must be laughing in his grave.
Fired for feeling, is it? Actually, Arnett was complimentary
of the courtesies extended to him by
the Iraqis. He complimented them for it, and was
roasted for doing so. Yet the other night on Charlie
Rose, John Burns of the NY Times was also
praising his minders for treating him courteously
as a professional. He said it straight out.
No one accused him of treason. It seems that the
150
NBC brass had bought some its own demonization
hype of Saddam. Reports the NY Times
today:
“Another NBC executive said that Mr. Shapiro
had hoped that the Iraqis pressured Mr. Arnett
in the interview and that he would say, ‘There
was a guy behind this orange curtain with an
AK-47.’
“But during a phone call, Mr. Arnett told Mr.
Shapiro that he felt no such pressure, a spokeswoman
said.
“NBC’s decision prompted some debate within
journalism circles.
“ ‘It’s regrettable that a news organization feels
compelled to fire a journalist for essentially
doing journalism,’ said Bill Kovach, chairman of
the Committee of Concerned Journalists.
“But many others said they supported NBC. ‘I
would have done the same,’ said Alex S. Jones,
director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. ‘It
would have been to me a very fundamental judgment
that you would not go on their state-controlled
television.’”
Writing in the New York Times today, Walter
Cronkite echoes this view: His argument: “Journalists
might recognize a motivation in Peter
Arnett’s acceptance of an interview with statecontrolled
Iraqi TV, but they should not excuse
it.”
Irony: Fired, but never hired
CORPORATE controlled television tethered to
the Pentagon is apparently above much criticism,
candid disclosure, or self-criticism. MSNBC
didn’t even have the guts to hire Arnett in the
first place, even though he was as good a war