NBC Fires Journalist for Giving Interview with Iraqi TV

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, April 01, 2003

NBC Fires Journalist for Giving Interview with Iraqi TV

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NBC, one of major US television networks, said Monday they had terminated their relationship with journalist Peter Arnett after he told state-run Iraqi TV that the US-led coalition's initial war plan had failed.

"It was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state controlled Iraqi TV -- especially at a time of war -- and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions inthat interview," NBC News President Neal Shapiro said in a statement.

Arnett went to Iraq this year not as an NBC News reporter but as an employee of the "National Geographic Explorer" program made by MSNBC, an NBC News-Microsoft joint venture. When other NBC reporters left Baghdad for safety reasons, NBC began airing his reports.

In the interview, broadcast by Iraq's satellite television station Sunday, Arnett said the United States was reappraising the battlefield and delaying the war, maybe for a week, "and rewriting the war plan."

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Nowthey are trying to write another war plan," he said. "Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces."

He said reports from Baghdad about civilian casualties and those about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, had helped antiwar protesters in the United States undermine the Bush administration's strategy.

NBC initially backed Arnett's interview on Sunday, saying the "impromptu interview" was done as a professional courtesy and his remarks were "analytical in nature."

Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The Associated Press, appeared on NBC's "Today" show Monday to apologize for his statements before the network announced its decision to fire him. "I want to apologize to the American people for clearly making a misjudgment," he said.

NBC said Arnett would not be reporting for "National Geographic Explorer" either.

Arnett garnered much of his prominence from covering the 1991 Gulf War for another major television network, the Cable News Network (CNN). He was among a few American television reporters left in Baghdad when the war began then.

The first Bush administration was unhappy with his reporting, suggesting that he had become a conveyor of propaganda. He was once denounced for his reporting about an allied bombing of a baby milk factory in Baghdad that the military said was a biological weapons plant.

In 1998, he was reprimanded over a CNN report accusing US forces of using sarin gas on a Laotian village in 1970 to kill US defectors. Two CNN employees were sacked.

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