​DOMINIKA WHITE

ANZAC: The Pulitzer boy from Bluff talks of war and peace

 

Peter Arnett, one of the world’s best-known war correspondents, today gave revealing glimpses of his media career, describing Osama Bin Laden as “relatively courteous” and Saddam Hussein as a “picture of diplomacy”.

 

The New Zealand-born reporter gave a pre-recorded address to a crowd of war veterans and their wives, media personalities and AUT University student journalists for Maori Television’s Anzac Day special.

 

He also spoke of his early experiences as a journalist in the Vietnam War and growing up in Bluff.

 

The 73-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner, now a journalism professor at Shantou University in China, interviewed both Bin Laden and Hussein during his career. He said this was not a way of giving terrorists a world stage, but a way of forcing dictators and terrorists to face up to tough questions.

 

He described them both as polite. Hussein was dressed in a suit; Bin Laden in a camouflage jacket with an AK47 - these men were adept at using the media to publicise their image to the world.

 

When asked whether television should show the “true horror” of war in order to stop war itself, Arnett responded by saying in some cases audiences did see the horror of war - such as the summary execution of a Viet Cong suspect in a Saigon street during the Vietnam War.

 

However, he said that political leaders such as Bin Laden and Hussein were apathetic to the destruction of war, and would be unaffected by media coverage.

 

War reporting

Arnett admitted he did not seek to be a war correspondent but was given the opportunity by his editor in London to become one.

 

“No one trains to become a war reporter, No one is crazy enough,” he said.

 

As a young man, he had originally trained at New Zealand’s Waiouru military camp to be sent to Korea but missed out after an artillery unit was dispatched instead.

 

He trained to be a reporter in the Southland Times with his two brothers.

 

“Journalism was our ticket ride out of Bluff,” he said.

 

He moved to London’s Fleet Street to live the “safe life,” only to be drafted into covering the Vietnam War after being the lone western journalist reporting on a coup in Laos.

 

“I did not shoot with a gun, I shot with a camera,” he said, believing that war reporting was important in combat areas.

 

Arnett told the audience that a war reporter must always be aware of the dangers.

 

“You learn to be familiar,” he said. He remembered curfews and safe routes in places such as Vietnam, where his coverage had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1966.

 

Arnett spoke of embedded journalism happening in Iraq and how media control had lessened since his experience of the two Gulf Wars.

 

He spoke of his own experiences of embedded journalism and its “moral ambiguities”. He said he held admiration for the soldiers, but knew he had to cover the war objectively.

​

Arnett has proved this difficulty himself after he was dismissed from National Geographic and NBC over a controversial interview about the Iraq war with an Iraqi television show.

 

Ngäi Tahu link

The Ngai Tahu descendant was pleased to speak about his Maori heritage. He said he often sang the Maori Battalion song as a young boy in Bluff.

 

He told the audience that talk of being part-Maori in America was seen as “bragging”.

 

“But it doesn’t really matter because it is inside of me,” he said.

 

Arnett was born in Invercargill where the Southern Institute of Technology has named its journalism school after him and he visits New Zealand every couple of years.