Page 19 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

ARNETT,
PETER
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by her father, Archie, who ran a weekly newspaper in southwestern Nebraska.
Furman was a member of the inner circle that enjoyed the good graces of the
First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt discussed the press conference idea with her before
the 1933 inauguration. Her decision to conduct press conferences made history
because she was the first president's wife to do so.
Only women could attend Mrs. Roosevelt's conferences. They worked as
reporters at a time when newspaper city rooms were "as sacred to men as a
stag club or pre-Volstead saloon," according to journalism historian Ishbell
Ross. While more than 10,000 women worked for newspapers at this time, only
a handful worked as reporters, known as front-page girls.
The Associated Press in Washington hired Furman in 1929. She came there
from the Omaha Bee-News, where she had been since 1920. She had covered
Democrat Al Smith's stump speech in Omaha in 1928 and also covered Herbert
Hoover's visit to his Iowa hometown. In 1927 she filed front-page stories on
President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge's vacation in South Dakota. The stories
were accompanied by her photo, indicating her front-page-girl status.
SOURCES: Maurine H. Beasley, ed., The White House Press Conferences of Eleanor
Roosevelt, 1983; Ishbell Ross, The Ladies of the Press, 1914.
Liz Watts

ARNETT, PETER (1934- ) is recognized as one of America's greatest war
correspondents. He is actually a New Zealander by birth. There he dropped out
of high school and headed for a career in journalism at a daily newspaper called
the Southland Times. Over the course of the 1950s, he worked for a variety of
Australian papers, and finally, in 1961, he became an Associated Press (AP)
stringer.
In the 1960s, Arnett covered Southeast Asia and eventually South Vietnam.
In South Vietnam, he worked hard to cover every angle of the war, which
sometimes included reporting on discrepancies between what the U.S. govern-
ment reported publicly and his own investigative reporting from the scene. This
type of journalism style earned him fans and foes: fans who welcomed the fresh,
honest reporting style and foes who labeled him a Vietnamese sympathizer, a
title he rejected. In 1966, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his reports from Vi-
etnam, where he reported on the war and related events for 11 years.
Arnett's reporting skills and international reputation helped launch CNN in
its endeavors to cover news events live no matter where they occurred. In the
1980s, he covered the Middle East, including the TWA hijacking in 1985. But
it wasn't until 1991 and the Gulf War that CNN was put on the map for its
ability to cover the war instantly—with help from Arnett. When the war started,
Arnett, other CNN staffers, and other Western journalists were in Baghdad, the
main city hit by rockets from the multinational collaborative effort to drive Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. When full war broke out, the Iraqi gov-
ernment permitted only one Western news agency to remain in Baghdad—Ar-
nett and CNN—but only if the information they used was "approved" and thus
censored by the government.