Newsertainment

Ted Koppel just stumbled upon something that Arthur Kent was warning about ten years ago when he left – then successfully sued – NBC;

His relationship with NBC began on a freelance basis, as Kent spent much of the ’80s covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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After covering the Tiananmen Square uprising in May 1989, the network made Kent its Rome correspondent, dispatching him to cover the fall of East Germany and, in the assignment that would result in the moniker “Scud Stud,” the Persian Gulf War.
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A bitter contract dispute in 1992 resulted in Kent suing the company for $25 million for breach of contract, fraud and defamation.
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At the heart of Kent’s dispute with NBC, and its parent company General Electric, was the shift in management’s concept of the news.
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In addition to cutting budgets drastically, international hard news was both losing airtime to magazine-style programs like Dateline NBC and being “crafted” to fit the more entertainment-oriented style.
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“It was a clash and a confrontation that was totally unnecessary, because once I had been convinced to join Dateline, I warned them in writing that the editorial direction of the program was dangerous and that the manipulation and re-editing of stories was going to cause trouble.”
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A climate was being created in which corruption was imminent, Kent said.
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“You could see that something like the exploding truck fiasco (a Dateline story about unsafe GM trucks in which toy rockets were used in test crashes to ensure fiery explosions and which caused a number of NBC resignations) would happen eventually.”
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Kent offered to resign, but NBC dug in for battle, assigning him to cover the war in Bosnia without the proper equipment or preparation. When he refused, the network publicly called him a coward.

With the millions he was rumoured to have recieved in settlement, Kent established an independant production company.

In 2001 while much of the network news industry was focusing on shark attacks and the Chandra Levy mystery, Arthur Kent’s production company, Fast Forward Films, was warning Americans about the dangers posed by the Taliban regime’s reign of terror and repression. Kent’s hour-long documentary Afghanistan: Captives of the Warlords, was broadcast nationally by PBS in June of 2001, and was extensively rebroadcast post-September 11. The program has won the Gold WorldMedal at the New York Festivals and a Golden Eagle award from the CINE organization.

Kent’s 1997 book, Risk And Redemption is a worthwhile read, and unsurprisingly prescient about the blurring of the line between news and entertainment that continues today.