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Nov 11: Pulitzer Prize Winner Peter Arnett Lecture on War Reporting

Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett will talk about interviewing bad guys, including Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, at the JMSC on Friday, November 11, 2011.

Peter Arnett with Osama Bin Laden

In a lecture called Video and Villains, Arnett will discuss his post-Vietnam career with CNN in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

He will emphasise how advanced media technology has allowed television news to play an outsized role in American policy-making in one of the world’s most sensitive areas.

About the Speaker:
Peter Arnett spent a career covering wars and international crises for major American news organisations, winning the Pulitzer Prize and other awards for his coverage of the Vietnam war for the Associated Press.

He is better known to the general public for his live television reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991. Coverage of that war, by Arnett and his colleagues, is credited with making CNN a household name.

Millions of viewers tuned in around the world to watch their dramatic accounts of the intense bombing campaign that signaled the war’s opening, and Arnett’s interview with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Arnett won a television Emmy for that assignment.

As the fear of terrorism grew in the 1990s, Arnett kept returning to Afghanistan. He was the first western journalist to have a TV interview with the arch-terrorist Osama Bin Laden, in a cave in the terrorist stronghold of Tora Bora.

He joined China’s Shantou University Cheung Kong School of Journalism as a professor in 2007 and remains in that post.

Date: Friday, November 11, 2011
Time: 3.30 – 5 pm (followed by a reception with light refreshments from 5 – 6pm + book signing)
Venue: Foundation Chamber, Eliot Hall, JMSC