Arthur Kent ‘Disgusted’ by NBC Suspension

Arthur Kent, who last year rose to prominence as one of NBC’s key reporter in the Persian Gulf, Friday called the network’s management team “incompetent and unworthy,” and accused executives of maligning him simply to get the upper hand in a contract dispute.

The day before, NBC News had confirmed to several newspapers that Kent and his producer, Joe Alicastro, had been suspended indefinitely without pay for refusing to accept an assignment to Zagreb, Croatia, to cover United Nations teams inspecting detention camps near there.

Kent, who said that he considers himself to be fired, not suspended, said he believes NBC set him up. NBC denied his allegations.

“I’m disgusted, because my colleagues are at risk covering a story which NBC News is implying I am afraid to be covering,” Kent said in a telephone interview from his residence in Rome.

The photogenic Kent, who earned the nickname “Scud Stud” during the Gulf War, said he was ordered to take the Zagreb assignment just two days after his attorney wrote NBC News Executive Vice Preisdent Don Browne a letter saying that, until a brewing contract dispute with the network was settled, the correspondent would not cover “hot spots.”

“I had a very serious editorial and contractual conflict under way with NBC News and had been trying for three months to offer solutions,” Kent said. “A battlefield is not the best place to conduct negotiations from.”

When he and Alicastro refused to go, the correspondent said, NBC effectively fired them, locking them out of the network’s Rome bureau and making the suspension indefinite.

That same day, NBC News President Michael Gartner sent a letter to Kent’s attorney that said, in part, “NBC intends to pursue all of its legal rights and remedies against Mr. Kent to address this blatant breach, up to and including immediate termination of his contract.”

NBC denied Kent’s charges. “Arthur is making a number of statements that we clearly disagree with, but there clearly have been a progression of problems,” said NBC News spokeswoman Peggy Hubble. “We have a different point of view. It’s been a larger, ongoing dispute which we hope to resolve internally with Arthur and his lawyers.”

Kent’s attorney, Bruce Lilliston, described the reporter as “shellshocked” by NBC’s move, and said his client was spending the day cleaning his Rome apartment and making plans to return to his home in London.

“He will be looking for another job,” Lilliston said. “He’s got to earn a living, and it’s not going to be with NBC.”

Lilliston maintained that NBC had made no plans to provide flak jackets, helmets or ground protection for Kent and Alicastro on the Zagreb assignment.

Lilliston, who provided The Times with copies of correspondence between himself, Kent and NBC, said that the posting to Yugoslavia was a retaliatory move, made after Kent came into conflict with his bosses on the prime-time newsmagazine, “Dateline NBC.”

But Hubble said that Zagreb was not considered a danger zone.

“Sarajevo is the center of critical fighting,” Hubble said, where sniper fire Thursday killed ABC-TV producer David Kaplan. “Other news people have described Zagreb as stable.”

Hubble said that NBC does allow reporters to refuse to go to Sarajevo, which the network considers to be unstable. And those who do go to the besieged Bosnian capital, she said, are encouraged to leave if the situation becomes particularly difficult.

Most recently, for example, the network allowed correspondent Tom Aspell to leave the city. He was replaced by Rick Davis, whose presence there is decided “on a day-to-day basis,” Hubble said.

But Kent said that, once in Zagreb, he would have wound up in Sarajevo anyway.

“I am not a milkman or a mailman,” he said. “I am a war correspondent. If I go into Zagreb, I am going to go where the action is.”

According to Lilliston, Kent’s troubles at NBC began soon after he was reassigned to “Dateline NBC” earlier this year. The correspondent was promised at that time that the program would be news-oriented, Lilliston said, and that if Kent were ever removed from the program, he would be named the network’s senior European correspondent.

But, according to Lilliston and discussed in his letters to NBC, Kent’s stories were rarely accepted by his bosses at “Dateline NBC.” When Kent asked why his work--including a story on survivors of torture in Guatemala--had been refused, he was told that executives in the network’s entertainment division, based in Burbank, felt that they were too hard-nosed, Lilliston said. Such control was exercised by the entertainment division, Lilliston claimed, despite the fact that the program was produced by NBC’s news division.

“One completed 12-minute story was shelved indefinitely with the explanation that ‘Burbank hates that kind of story,’ ” Lilliston wrote in a July 31 letter to Gartner.

Shortly thereafter, Kent was reassigned at his request to the network’s European bureau.

According to Kent, he was never made senior European correspondent. But according to the network, as described in a letter to Lilliston from Gartner, he was indeed given that title.

With regards to Alicastro, Hubble said that the producer was suspended for no reason other than his refusal to go to Zagreb. But Lilliston charged that the producer was perceived to be an ally of Kent by NBC News executives, and therefore was included in the action meted out to the correspondent. Two others in the Rome bureau, a photographer and a sound engineer, were not disciplined for refusing the assignment.