Biography

Mr Peter Arnett
The Associated Press reporter

Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent Peter Arnett has spent a lifetime covering wars and international crises for major American news organizations.

Arnett is best known for his live television coverage from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991, including his interview with President Saddam Hussein. Arnett won a television Emmy.

Forty years ago as a young news correspondent, Arnett began covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, an assignment would last 13 years, from the buildup of US military advisers in the early 1960s to the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1981, Arnett joined CNN, covering wars and civil disturbances in scores of countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

As the fear of terrorism grew in the 1990s Arnett kept returning to Afghanistan. He was the first western journalist to interview the arch-terrorist Osama Bin Laden. After leaving CNN in 1999, Arnett worked for Foreign TV.com, Camera Planet TV in New York, and was on assignment in Baghdad for National Geographic Explorer when Gulf War 11 broke out in March, 2003.

He volunteered to help out the NBC TV network and MSNBC in daily news coverage after the network's crew left Baghdad at the beginning of the war. That coverage came to an end after Arnett gave a controversial interview to Iraqi TV critical of the US war planning. However, Arnett continued to cover the war for the London Daily Mirror newspaper and several Arab, European and Asian TV networks.

Arnett lectures on the media and the Iraq situation and has spent several months in 2007 as a Visiting Professor at the Chueng Kong School of Journalism and Communications at the Shantou University.

He has written his autobiography "Live from the Battlefield", which was named "a Book of the Year" by the New York Times.

Over the years, Arnett has received 57 major journalism awards and also honorary doctorate degrees from universities in the United States and Brazil. In the Queen's honors of 2006, Arnett was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to journalism.

 

Master Piece 1
Master Piece 2
Hong Kong Baptist University