NBC has refused to renew the contract of Iraq correspondent Dr. Bob Arnot. He says the reason is that he dares to find progress.
"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," the New York Observer's Joe Hagan reported today.
"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.'"
Keelor told the Observer: "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 Iraq since the war started is unexpected."
In his letter to Shapiro, Arnot wondered, as has the Bush administration, why the network refused to admit positive developments in Iraq. "As you know, I have regularly pitched most of these stories contained in the note to Nightly, Today and directly to you. Every single story has been rejected."
Arnot told the Observer he knew for "a fact" that Shapiro’s problem with his reporting was that "it was just very positive."
Editor's note:
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Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Media Bias
Middle East
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
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