Arthur Kent

Arthur Kent

"One of the best of the breed."
-- Walter Cronkite

"He was always as much news stud as Scud Stud, his long pedigree as a serious journalist speaking impressively for itself."
-- Howard Rosenberg, Los Angeles Times. (Dec 20, 2002)


Journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and outspoken critic of the dumbing down of network news, Arthur Kent covered the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as Contributing Editor of Maclean's, Canada's weekly newsmagazine. Kent has made a specialty of solo assignments in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Iraq, but has also been part of large network news teams.

He won back-to-back Emmy Awards for NBC's 1989 coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Romanian uprising. During the 1991 Gulf War, Kent reported the first-ever live coverage of missile vs. anti-missile warfare. One year later, the "Scud Stud" was forced into a legal battle with NBC management over the intrusion of entertainment values into news. Kent won a record settlement from NBC, and the right to publish the evidence in his book Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars. Kent went on to host CBC's MAN ALIVE and set up his own production company, Fast Forward Films.

Three months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his documentary about the Taliban, AFGHANISTAN: CAPTIVES OF THE WARLORDS, was broadcast by PBS. The program was extensively re-telecast by PBS and the CBC in Canada after 9/11, and won the Gold WorldMedal at the New York Festivals and a Golden Eagle award from the CINE organization. Kent's other documentary productions include the cinematic short subject A VIEW OF BOSNIA (1993), RETURN TO AFGHANISTAN (CBC, 1995); A WEDDING IN BASRA (PBS, 1998); THE BLACK LEGION: Terror in the Heartland (The History Channel, 2000); AMERICA'S LOST BOMBS: The True Story of Broken Arrows (The History Channel, 2001); AFGHANISTAN: LEGACY OF WAR (The History Channel, 2001); BACK TO BASRA: After Saddam (The History Channel, 2003).

Arthur Kent is a member of the International Federation of Journalists and Britain's National Union of Journalists, and of PEN Canada and the Writer's Union of Canada. He is a director of the Military Reporters and Editors of America, and co-founder of TVNewscan, a project of The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, which will assess television news coverage of the Iraq war.

Next stop ? Buy his book
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