John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships

Peter Arnett

3rd Annual John S. Knight Lecturer

A native of New Zealand where he graduated from Waitaki College, Peter Arnett worked for newspapers in New Zealand, Australia and Thailand before joining the Associated Press in 1962. He went to Vietnam to cover the war for the AP and continued to cover the Vietnam story through the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1966, he won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam coverage. Arnett was described in an Esquire magazine article as "the reporter who probably covered more of the Vietnam War than anyone else."

In addition to the Pulitzer, his Vietnam coverage brought him two awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, plus the Overseas Press Club award and the George Polk Memorial Award.

After covering Vietnam for so long, many journalists would have turned to tamer subjects. But not Arnett.

In the years following Vietnam, he covered for the AP such stories as the Iranian hostage crisis, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana and the child murder cases in Atlanta.

In 1981 he switched from print to broadcast, joining the upstart news network, CNN. Again, he took on the tough stories – political and military crises in El Salvador, famine in Ethiopia and a return to Vietnam to assess conditions there 10 years after the end of the war.

From 1986 to 1988, Arnett served as CNN’s bureau chief in Moscow, reporting on the rapid changes in the Soviet Union. Then he went to Washington, where he focused on domestic and international policy, and on national security and the intelligence community.

Early in 1990, he transferred to CNN’s bureau in Jerusalem. He observed, studied and learned about the Mideast in depth, and was in the right place at the right time when the Gulf War began. He remained in Baghdad when other journalists left, and thus became the only western journalist to report from Iraq during the entire course of the war, and conducted the only interview with Saddam Hussein during the conflict.

His work on the war won huge amounts of praise – and some smaller amounts of criticism, based primarily on the fact that he had to submit his reports to Iraqi censorship. But Arnett stretched the limits of that censorship system, and managed to provide vivid and insightful reports that helped give a clearer picture of the war. Many critics eventually realized this and his chief antagonist, Sen. Alan Simpson (who at one point accused Arnett of serving as a Hussein sympathizer), ended up apologizing to him.