After meetings that lasted more than nine hours, senior executives at CNN decided Wednesday that Pulitzer-prize winning correspondent Peter Arnett was not deeply involved in a disputed report aired by the network and can keep his job
Arnett and the executives began meetings at 8 a.m. Wednesday to discuss a report on CNN last month, since retracted, accusing the U.S. military of using nerve gas against defectors in a 1970 raid in Laos. After an internal investigation, CNN executives said the charges in the report could not be supported.
The producers who investigated the story and prepared the final script were fired. Another producer quit in protest over the retraction.
Arnett, who presented the report on “CNN NewsStand: CNN and Time” and who shared a byline on a story about nerve gas that appeared in Time magazine, was reprimanded.
Perhaps CNN’s most famous face, Arnett is best known for his live reports from Baghdad during the Persian Gulf war.
In statements last week, Arnett said he had had little to do with the investigation of the nerve-gas story and should not be fired for errors in the report.
“It has been decided that Peter Arnett’s reprimand stands,” said a statement issued Wednesday evening by CNN’s chief executive, Tom Johnson. “No further personnel action is planned.”
Steve Hayworth, a spokesman for the network, said executives found that Arnett “had very little to do with the preparation of the report,” and that the correspondent “didn’t deserve action as stringent as suspension or being fired.”
The decision is part of the network’s effort to lay to rest the heated controversy over its report on Operation Tailwind, which ignited protests from military officials across the country.
New York media lawyer Floyd Abrams investigated the CNN report, at the network’s request, and found that producers relied on unconfirmed information and discarded facts that went against their version of the truth. Abrams recommended that CNN retract the story.
In his meetings with executives Wednesday, Arnett explained his role in the report on Operation Tailwind. He told them that he conducted only three on-camera interviews, using scripted questions, with former soldiers already interviewed by producers.
Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his Associated Press reports from Vietnam, said he hadn’t researched the nerve-gas story but had no reason to doubt it.
“I didn’t know whether it was true or not. Laos was a black hole during the war. A lot went on there that we didn’t know about,” Arnett told The AP.
All week, however, other reporters at CNN have wondered out loud whether Arnett received special treatment because of his popularity and his Pulitzer Prize. Hayworth, the CNN spokesman, dismissed the idea.
“The action was due to the extent of (Arnett’s) involvement with the report, not to who he was or was not,” Hayworth said. “I think any reporter would have been treated the same way.”
