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Times Watch for 03/31/03
Petered Out: Frank Rich’s Advocacy for Arnett and Jennings Turns Embarrassing
As if the headline on Frank Rich’s latest Times Arts & Leisure column, “Iraq Around the Clock,” wasn’t bad enough, the star of the piece, war correspondent Peter Arnett, was fired by NBC this morning for granting an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV.
Rich rolls out his usual shtick—the Iraq war is show business, starring reporters as “enthusiastic embedees.” But unlike the movies, Rich can’t yell “CUT!” on his praise for NBC and MSNBC correspondent Peter Arnett: “One person on the scene who didn’t buy the initial story line.” (During the 1991 Gulf War, Arnett notoriously relayed the Iraqi regime’s claim that a weapons plant bombed by allied forces was actually a baby-milk factory.)
Rich fawns: “[Arnett] recognized a mindless TV rerun when he saw it. ‘It's déjà vu all over again, the idea that this would be a walkover, the idea that the people of Basra would throw flowers at the Marines,’ he said from Baghdad when I spoke with him by phone last week. Unlike many of his peers, he had been there to see the early burst of optimism in Persian Gulf War I, which he covered for CNN. ‘This is going to be tough,’ he said just before it became tough. ‘Whatever you think about Saddam Hussein, there is a sense of nationalism here. The Iraqis like American culture — American movies and pop songs. But are they really going to like American tanks?’”
In a fitting irony, the very same day Rich praised Arnett for not sticking to the Bush administration’s script, Arnett played a starring role as pro-Saddam propagandist on state-controlled Iraqi television. Even a report by Arnett’s former CNN colleagues gave him sour marks for his Sunday interview, given by an Iraqi anchorman in green military uniform: “Arnett -- who is reporting for National Geographic Television and NBC News -- also said Iraq has given him and other reporters a ‘degree of freedom which we appreciate,’ this despite the fact that Iraq has expelled several journalists, including CNN's Baghdad team, and apparently has imprisoned two journalists from the New York newspaper Newsday.” Perhaps sensing a coming critical sandstorm, Arnett went on NBC’s Today show Monday morning to apologize, but couldn’t save his job.
Arnett wasn’t the only “journalist” named Peter praised by Frank Rich. Of criticism of ABC anchor Peter Jennings, he writes: “His real sin was to violate the unspoken rule that in the early stages of a war journalists should junk the tools of skepticism and irony on camera.” Rich’s favorite Jennings moment:
“After Donald Rumsfeld spoke in a post-‘Shock and Awe’ press conference of ‘the humanity’ of American weaponry pinpointing noncivilian targets, Mr. Jennings said, ‘No offense to the secretary, but at this moment we simply do not know whether that is the case.’”
That “Unfriendly” American Flag
“It was possible that the people, who are mostly Shiite Muslims, were put off by the zeal of a group of American marines who had briefly planted the Stars and Stripes at the port last week, portraying themselves more as occupiers than friends.” -- The Times Jane Perlez and Marc Santora, on allied troops delivering relief supplies to towns in Southern Iraq, from Saturday’s paper.
Times TV reporter Alessandra Stanley, writing on war coverage: “It is the definition of patriotism that cleaves Fox from other newsrooms. Fox embraces a passionate partisanship; ABC and others view impartial reporting as their contribution to the national good.”
If someone understands how ABC’s pro-French favoritism and channeling of Iraqi propaganda contributes to America’s good, could they explain it to us?
Poverty, Bribery, Suicide? Let’s Rebuild The Wall
Two weeks after he bizarrely suggested the Czech Republic’s inauguration of a conservative president led a teen to suicide, Times reporter Peter Green on Saturday blames Poland’s poverty on the collapse of Communism.
Green’s story is ostensibly about a bribery scandal, but he takes a strange detour and runs off the far-left side of the road: “In almost all former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, many people — particularly those impoverished by the collapse of Communism — believe that privileged cliques used insider connections to grow rich and powerful in the swift transition to capitalism.”
Green continues: “As in other former Communist countries, outside the few pockets of urban prosperity, many ordinary Poles have seen their living standards plummet since the fall of Communism. ‘The power decides who will be rich, and on the other side, the rich businessmen increase their influence on politicians,’ said Jerzy Urban, a former spokesman for the Communist-era government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, and now the editor of Nie, a satirical weekly.”
So: A former flak for Poland’s Communist regime argues that the collapse of Communism was a bad thing. That’s news?
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org