UPDATED - ColdType

Arnett back on the air
PETER ARNETT is also back on the air from
Baghdad. AP reports on its former staffer:
“Within days of being fired by the U.S. network
NBC, Arnett found an unlikely new audience
Thursday: the Dutch-speaking and hopefully
English-comprehending citizens of northern Belgium.
‘Thanks Peter Arnett, we are proud to
have you on our team,’ said VTM news anchor
Dany Verstraeten after Arnett finished his first
report for the private Belgian TV network.
“VTN said it will have daily reports from one
of the world’s most famous reporters until the
end of the war. Also Thursday, a state-run TV
channel in Greece said Arnett would soon be
providing nightly dispatches for it, too. ‘This
story also shows how TV networks around the
world do not share the values and viewpoints of
the US based cable news networks.’
“Arnett, who apologized for his ‘misjudgment,’
told VTM he was a casualty of the information
war. ‘There are two wars taking place. You have
the war of bullets and bombs, then you have the
information war,’ he said. He complained he was
making ‘just obvious statements’ about the war
that should not have backfired the way they did.
‘This caused a firestorm in America. I was called
a traitor,’ he said, adding NBC ‘let me crash and
burn.’”
Pro-war media relentless
ON the pro-war side of the media war, we have
an assessment to share from Steve Johnson of
the Chicago Tribune, who explains what Fox
News is doing right. (I used that word knowingly.)
WAR KILLS JOURNALISTS
173
“They report. We deride.
“We deride Fox News Channel for saying ‘us’
and ‘our’ in talking about the American war
effort, a strategy that conjures images of gung-ho
anchor Shepard Smith, like Slim Pickens in ‘Dr.
Strangelove,’ riding a Tomahawk straight into
Baghdad.
“We deride Fox for playing ratings politics with
the news, turning Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard
Myers’ public call Tuesday for media to be ‘fair
and balanced’ into a back-door endorsement,
pointing out frequently afterward that the general
had echoed a Fox News marketing slogan.
“This, the folks in the bunker at Fox would
argue, is due to the rest of the media’s liberal
agenda, an agenda Fox News slyly re-alleges with
every repetition of ‘fair and balanced’ (the others
aren’t) and ‘we report; you decide’ (‘they’
don’t give you that chance).
“A less calculatedly paranoid worldview would
recognize that scrutiny is the price of success, of
the channel becoming, in a sense, the Scud stud
of this Persian Gulf conflict. Ratings during the
war have confirmed that Roger Ailes’ and Rupert
Murdoch’s upstart operation has become the
clear leader in cable news popularity.” (Should
that be ’cheer leader?’)
“Fox News has held the lead it built in peacetime
by following its well-established and fairly
simple recipe: dollops of news reported by
comely anchors and correspondents tossed atop
a main dish of attitude and argument led by
charismatic and right-leaning hosts.”
This piece is worth studying because Steve is
right. Knocking Fox or dismissing it is too easy.
We need to study its formula and understand its
appeal.