Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303120087
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HOWARD ROSENBERG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
FIRED CORRESPONDENT IS STILL SORE AT NBC
If anyone is surprised at how low NBC News has plummeted in the wake of the "Dateline NBC" crash-rigging scandal, prompting the resignation of news division president Michael Gartner, just remember . . .Arthur Kent told you so.
Gartner is "an insect," says the 39-year-old Kent, still angry at the company that hired him as a full-time foreign correspondent in 1988, then fired him in 1992 in a messy incident that made headlines.
Kent was based in Rome and unhappily attached to the prime-time "Dateline NBC" when he was released by the network Aug. 21 after refusing an assignment to Zagreb, Croatia.
In firing Kent - who had soared to news stardom while reporting on the Persian Gulf War from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia - NBC claimed he was a prima donna and as out of control as a "Scud" missile, implying also that Kent wasn't exactly John Wayne or Arnold Schwarzenegger when it came to courage.
Kent maintained then, as he does now, that he balked at Zagreb because he was in a contract dispute with NBC at the time and because he was ordered there without sufficient planning and adequate security for a war zone.
On Oct. 29, Kent filed a $25 million lawsuit against NBC, claiming that it had carried on a campaign to defame him, specifically citing Gartner, now-acting news president Don Browne, former "NBC Nightly News" executive producer Steve Friedman, "Dateline NBC" executive producer Jeff Diamond and Peggy Hubble, the network's director of news information.
"If I was such a difficult prima donna, how could NBC News management in all good conscience assign a person like that to a war zone?" asked Kent, who is in Los Angeles polishing a short documentary he has made about war-ravaged Bosnia, which he has visited twice since leaving NBC.
Kent has never publicly charged "Dateline NBC" with injecting fakery into his stories. Not . . . quite. However, he has accused Diamond of "show-business concerns" in seeking to "distort the content" of three foreign stories he did for "Dateline NBC."
Regarding one of them, Kent said he was told by Diamond that "balance isn't as important as getting a good flow of words."
Kent said that although he agreed to work for "Dateline NBC" only after being assured "it was going to be hard news," Diamond began "spiking" his foreign stories in favor of softer ones. He said that Diamond and David Rummel, "Dateline NBC" senior producer, told him that "the entertainment division in Burbank has more to do with this show than we had anticipated. In other words, they're all over this program."
Commenting on Kent's charges, Hubble said from New York that although the network's promotion department decided which segments of "Dateline NBC" to advertise on the air, the news division has "total control" over the program's content.
Nonetheless, charges of growing chumminess between NBC's news and entertainment divisions did not originate with Kent. Ken Auletta writes in "Three Blind Mice," his probing profile of the three major networks, about a "boundaryless" NBC envisioned by network president Bob Wright and Jack Welch, chairman of NBC's corporate parent, General Electric. According to Auletta, the two executives foresaw an NBC with no walls separating news, entertainment, sales and other divisions, allowing ideas to "gush like oil" from one to the other.
In conjunction with Kent's amputation from NBC, the only thing gushing like oil was the ridicule of him in some circles, greased in part by his decision to stand outside NBC's headquarters in Manhattan one day last August and distribute a letter to his former colleagues giving his side of a dispute in which both sides have claimed to be victims.
"I conducted myself as a gentleman and a professional," Kent said. "But NBC tried to give it a spin that I was a fruitcake, instead of a proud man who refused to allow my reputation to be besmirched. They were pumping out lies about me."
Unable to find steady work as a TV journalist since being severed from NBC, Kent says he has been living on savings. He has filed six stories on Bosnia for programs on the BBC and the CBC in his Canadian homeland, and one for ABC's "World News Tonight." But his agent's feelers to ABC and CBS for something permanent were rejected.
"They didn't want to touch me," Kent said. "Nobody is going to offer someone who's been so roundly defamed a full-time correspondent's slot, especially when foreign coverage is in sharp decline everywhere."
Thus, Kent, who owns a home in London, has been spending time in Los Angeles working on his Bosnia documentary, which he hopes to distribute to both theaters and TV. Plus, he said he's been engaging in some discussions about a possible news project at Fox. And thinking about how corporate giant GM made NBC back down, when he couldn't.
"They have the resources to wear me down," he said. "But I refuse to be worn down. What I want is a complete and utter apology and a total retraction of the lies. I will not stop until I receive that."