Airwaves are filled with more than Arnett’s rants
Peter Arnett rose to fame during the first Gulf War when his eerie green, night-vision dispatches from Baghdad for CNN gave the folks back home the first real-time war footage to digest. His status was nearly heroic among Americans who marveled over Arnett’s ability to stay with the story at the epicenter of Saddam Hussein’s world while other journalists had fled. Others thought the enemy used him as a propaganda tool. Over the weekend Arnett, covering the Iraqi war again from Baghdad but this time for National Geographic and NBC, gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi TV in which he said the United State’s initial war plan failed because of Iraq’s unexpected resistance. For this, some shrieking heads, who believe one word of dissent during a time of war confirms the speaker is a traitor, have branded Arnett most un-American. NBC fired him.
Arnett is neither the hero of the first war nor a traitor to the second. He is a journalist and as such he must take great care to remain an “observer” and not a “participant.” That he crossed the line in offering an analysis or opinion on television is a dangerous blurring of the line. But Arnett and all the talking heads that are bringing this war into homes unedited and undocumented are guilty of the same. Arnett’s major crime is that he said the same thing others are saying on American airways on the airways of the enemy.
That isn’t un-American; it’s poor journalism. And it’s being practiced by far too many TV journalists.