- Bob Arnot, the medical doctor turned foreign correspondent
for MSNBC and NBC News"the onetime chief medical correspondent "Dr.
Bob" on NBC News, who has been filing prickly, Geraldo-like dispatches
from Iraq"has been conspicuously absent from TV lately. Dr. Arnot,s
contract was up at NBC in December 2003 and, according to the network,
won,t be renewed in the foreseeable future.
-
- Dr. Arnot did not leave willingly.
-
- Although personal, his departure has also exposed the
divides over TV coverage of the war in Iraq.
-
- In a 1,300-word e-mail to NBC News president Neal Shapiro,
written in December 2003 and obtained by NYTV, Dr. Arnot called NBC News,
coverage of Iraq biased. He argued that keeping him in Iraq and on NBC
could go far in rectifying that. Dr. Arnot told Mr. Shapiro that NBC had
alienated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since it shot
and then aired footage of correspondent Jim Miklaszewski at the scene of
the November bombing of the Al Rashid Hotel, in which a C.P.A. staffer
was shown injured. That incident, he wrote, "earned the undying enmity
of the C.P.A."
-
- "We,ve been at a significant disadvantage given
NBC,s reputation in Iraq," Dr. Arnot wrote Mr. Shapiro. He argued
that due to his excellent relationships with military and C.P.A. personnel,
NBC News could repair its standing with government authorities by airing
more of his material.
-
- "I,m uniquely positioned to report the story,"
he wrote. "NBC Nightly News routinely takes the stories that I shoot
and uses the footage, even to lead the broadcast," but "refuses
to allow the story to be told by the reporter on the scene."
-
- In other words, he suggested, NBC News did not like putting
him on the air.
-
- Dr. Arnot included excerpts from an e-mail from Jim Keelor,
president of Liberty Broadcasting, which owns eight NBC stations throughout
the South. Mr. Keelor had written NBC, stating that "the networks
are pretty much ignoring" the good-news stories in Iraq. "The
definition of news would incorporate some of these stories," he wrote.
"Hence the Fox News surge."
-
- Reached for comment, Mr. Keelor said that he was "not
lambasting anyone" and that NBC News "indicated they were sensitive
to the issues." But he added, "Of course it,s political. Journalism
and news is what unusual [events] happened that day. And if the schools
are operating, they can say that,s usual. My response to that is, The hell
it is., My concern there is that almost everything that has occurred in
a Iraq since the war started is unexpected."
-
- That pretty much summed up Dr. Arnot,s attitude as well.
In his letter to Mr. Shapiro, he wondered why the network wasn,t reporting
stories of progress in Iraq, a frequently heard complaint of the Bush administration.
"As you know, I have regularly pitched most of these stories contained
in the note to Nightly, Today and directly to you," he wrote. "Every
single story has been rejected."
-
- Reached at home in Vermont, Dr. Arnot said Mr. Shapiro
was no longer interested in his kind of coverage. "On the MSNBC side,
they,ve been very generous and they want me back," he said. "But
from the NBC vantage point, Neal neglected to put any money into the pot,
and that,s the reason I,m not back in Baghdad."
-
- Did Mr. Shapiro respond to his e-mail? "That particular
e-mail, I didn,t get any response," he said. "There was an earlier
e-mail, and the response said, We,re just too strapped. We don,t have the
money to be able to afford the editorial oversight.,"
-
- Dr. Arnot said he knew for "a fact" that Mr.
Shapiro,s problem with his reporting was that "it was just very positive."
-
- Mr. Shapiro responded by e-mail, saying that NBC News
had re-evaluated its coverage for 2004, determined that "we were in
the post-war period in Iraq" and shifted its resources to political
coverage.
-
- "Given that we were well covered in Iraq with regular
correspondents, we explored other options with Bob, which to this point
have not resulted in a new agreement . Any implication that NBC News has
been reluctant to cover the rebuilding story in Iraq is absolutely ridiculous,"
Mr. Shapiro wrote, citing pieces on "the reopening of schools"
and on how the 101st Airborne "reorganized the north and has very
good relations there." Mr. Shapiro added that the Center for Media
and Public Affairs found NBC News to be the most balanced among the networks.
"I am proud of our coverage, and feel absolutely comfortable with
the way Bob Arnot,s reporting was utilized by the network."
-
- A number of high-ranking military officials contacted
by NYTV complimented Dr. Arnot,s superior reporting skills, especially
in light of what they perceived as the chronically negative war reporting
on TV in the United States. Larry DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman for Donald
Rumsfeld, said that Dr. Arnot captured Iraq as he experienced it when he
visited there himself. "It was complex and nuanced and uneven then,
and you had to get around to see it that way"and he does," Mr.
DiRita said. "I think his coverage provided an aspect of daily Iraqi
life that is being missed by a heck of a lot of coverage."
-
- Maj. Clark Taylor e-mailed NYTV from Baghdad to state
that Dr. Arnot "highlighted what is really happening over here . He
generally reported positive things because, generally, that is what is
happening. Of course there are occasional bad things and he reported those
as well. The fact was, he reported what he saw"which generally was
positive."
-
- "As you probably know, he is quite a renaissance
man (doctor, athlete, TV journalist, etc.)," wrote Maj. Gen. David
H. Petraeus in an e-mail, "and the Screaming Eagles, (the nickname
for the 101st,s soldiers) really took to him. Our soldiers and leaders
were particularly pleased that he demonstrated so much interest in the
nation-building endeavors that were carried out by our troopers and our
many superb Iraqi partners."
-
- Another military official, Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling,
said he and his colleagues had recently done an assessment of the 37 reporters
they,d worked with, determining which ones they liked and which ones they
didn,t. "Thirty-seven different reporters we talked about, and we
decided who we would really like to go to war with in the future, or who
we would like to drink a beer with later on," General Hertling told
NYTV. "I won,t tell you that number," he added, laughing, but
he did say Dr. Arnot was at the top of the list.
-
- In his e-mail to Mr. Shapiro, Dr. Arnot argued that his
relationships with the authorities earned him access to stories that other
reporters couldn,t get.
-
- "I was the only reporter to be shown the actual
list of terrorists found in Saddam,s briefcase," he wrote. "The
military even let me witness the capture of one of the leaders of the insurgency
a major general in the Baathist military wing."
-
- And Mr. Shapiro had a number of complimentary things
to say about Dr. Arnot, calling him an "intrepid live reporter."
-
- But in the halls of NBC News, a number of insiders at
the network said, Dr. Arnot was seen as a cheerleader for the military
and the C.P.A. Some questioned his accuracy as a reporter.
-
- In 1998, Mr. Arnot,s best-selling book, The Breast Cancer
Prevention Diet, came under intense scrutiny from medical watchdogs for
its broad claims"so much so that both the American Cancer Society
and MemorialSloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City complained of
inaccuracies and misstatements in Dr. Arnot,s book. "In the end, there
were no technical faults with the book," said Dr. Arnot.
-
- In 2001, Dr. Arnot"then chief medical correspondent
for NBC,s Today show and for Dateline NBC"gave up his stethoscope
and donned a flak jacket for some foreign adventures.
-
- Dr. Arnot,s friendship with MSNBC president Erik Sorenson,
a colleague from his days at CBS, helped transform him into a special foreign
correspondent after Sept. 11, 2001. He made his way to dangerous hot spots
like Sudan and Somalia, writing about his adventures for Men,s Journal;
in 2003, he went to Baghdad and embedded with the First Marine Expeditionary
Force.
-
- "There was a lot of pressure to make sure that Fox
didn,t win the war," said an NBC insider familiar with Dr. Arnot,s
work. But, the insider said, NBC "didn,t have correspondents who wanted
to fight that war." Dr. Arnot was willing and able. He said he had
risked his life many times for MSNBC and NBC News. And he was very friendly
with the military.
-
- In his e-mail, Dr. Arnot revealed the kind of thing he
would offer NBC if he was allowed to stay: "At the end of the war
I scrubbed in on an operation to save a young girl hit by a grenade. As
a female surgeon closed her abdomen at the end of the operation, I asked
if the child would survive. She said, Yes she will, she is the future of
Iraq., She also survived because a US Army sergeant took the ticking grenade
from her hand and turned away from her. The girl survived because of his
heroism. At my request, the Army sent a Blackhawk helicopter to evacuate
a four and a half year old girl with 55 percent burns under fire and
protected by two Apache gunships. These stories never made air on NBC.
-
- "What happens if NBC is wrong[?]" he wrote.
"What happens if this is a historical mission that does succeed that
transforms the Middle East that brings peace and security to America.
What if NBC,s role was like that of much of the media in general allowing
the terrorists to fight their war on the American television screen, where
their stories of death and destruction dominate rather than that of American
heroes?"
-
- Dr. Arnot became popular with military leaders in Iraq
and with the C.P.A. in Baghdad. A high-ranking C.P.A. official said Dr.
Arnot "was visible, he was active, he told a compete story,"
adding that NBC News had effectively stopped reporting on Iraq, leaving
a single Pentagon reporter, Mr. Miklaszewski, in Baghdad. "NBC doesn,t
really cover the Iraq story," the official said. "They don,t
have serious resources on the ground. If they did, they would cover the
release of the Zarqawi memo with a reporter on the ground," referring
to a document that the U.S. military said demonstrates an Iraqi insurrection
orchestrated by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a terrorist that the White House has
linked to Al Qaeda.
-
- "It,s been over six months since Brokaw has been
here," the official added. "There are over 120,000 troops on
the ground and there,s no real NBC presence."
-
- Dr. Arnot told NYTV: "I,ve been attacked many times"once
with guns, once with swords. Once was at the al-Aike Hotel when it was
blown up. There have been no journalists who have been purposely attacked.
And the bomb was right under my window. We were attacked with swords down
in Najaf. It was a 10 seconds, difference between being hacked down . And
just before Christmas, I was basically ambushed with assault weapons in
Abu Ghraib in the middle of the night. That was a bad situation. It,s a
very dangerous thing. My mother is saying, I don,t think it,s the smart
thing for you to be out there.,"
-
- Dr. Arnot,s e-mail to Mr. Shapiro claimed that the Sept.
25, 2003, bombing of the al-Aike Hotel in Baghdad"where NBC employees
were stationed at the time"was aimed directly at him. "I,ve been
targeted on several occasions," he wrote, recalling "a bomb placed
directly under my window at the IKE [sic] hotel resulting in several shrapnel
wounds."
-
- Dr. Arnot,s enthusiasm occasionally got the best of him,
said NBC News staffers, such as when Dr. Arnot"who claimed he knew
how to speak Arabic"tried his chops on some Iraqi barber-shop customers,
asking them what they thought of a speech by President Bush. "He,s
telling them what Bush is saying in Arabic and then translating their
responses live on the air," said one co-worker, who said that NBC
translators "said he was talking gibberish."
-
- "I was asking these guys yes-or-no questions, and
this guy went on and on and on," said Dr. Arnot. "There are many
kinds of Arabic and am I good at understanding the Iraqi accent? No, I,m
terrible."
-
- NBC sources said that when the statue of Saddam Hussein
was toppled in Baghdad, Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw declined to put
Dr. Arnot on the air, even though he was the sole NBC reporter on the scene.
Instead, Mr. Brokaw aired a British reporter from a news agency called
ITN. "They used ITN, their British affiliate rather than someone
on the NBC payroll," said the NBC staffer. "They don,t use his
reporting because they don,t trust his reporting."
-
- In November, Dr. Arnot reported a series for MSNBC,s
Hardball, "Iraq: The Real Story," an effort to find the so-called
"good news" stories that Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III and the
C.P.A. had found lacking in the media. The C.P.A. was so distressed by
network coverage that its senior media advisor, Dorrance Smith, created
a separate government feed"an attempt to provide the kind of stories
they wanted to local affiliates in the U.S.
-
- Mr. Smith told NYTV that he had prompted MSNBC to do
the Hardball series.
-
- Dr. Arnot was not the first NBC employee to complain
about coverage in Iraq. In fact, Noah Oppenheim, the producer of the Hardball
series, a self-identified neoconservative and onetime producer for Scarborough
Country, wrote an article for The Weekly Standard upon his return from
his three weeks in Iraq, asserting that reporters rarely got out of the
so-called Green Zone in Baghdad, and that they cribbed wire reports. Mr.
Oppenheim left MSNBC when Nightly News executive producer Steve Capus and
anchor Tom Brokaw complained openly that the article was unseemly coming
from a NBC-affiliated news producer.
-
- While Dr. Arnot,s fitness as a reporter may be under
scrutiny, his criticism of NBC News does go to the heart of an ongoing
issue in this election season, the media perception of the war in Iraq.
On Sunday, Feb. 8, when Tim Russert asked President Bush on NBC,s Meet
the Press if the administration had miscalculated "how we would be
treated and received in Iraq," Mr. Bush,s responded that he disagreed
with the premise of the question: "Well, I think we are welcomed in
Iraq. I,m not exactly sure, given the tone of your questions, we,re not."
-
- The exchange showed the distance between the White House
and the media on how the war had been presented to Americans. They were
two men watching different TV shows"Mr. Bush had his sources, and
Mr. Russert saw what he saw.
-
- And so did Dr. Arnot.
-
- You may reach Joe Hagan via email at: jhagan@observer.com.
-
- This column ran on page 1 in the 2/16/2004 edition of
The New York Observer.
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- http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage3.asp
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