For the ‘Scud Stud,’ it’s all about access to the action

The present never escapes the past.

Flashback to the U.S. versus Saddam Hussein Part 1, when it was another nerve-jangling night on the media’s Persian Gulf War beat as falling missiles sent edgy TV reporters scrambling in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

It was a night when NBC correspondent Arthur Kent sprang into action there while readying a war update for halftime of his network’s Raiders-Bills AFC championship telecast. As sirens wailed in the background, the usually unflappable Kent frantically waved his gas mask while trying to alert NBC’s New York office, unaware the camera was rolling.

“Hello, New York! They’re firing Patriots! This is not a drill!”

The date was Jan. 20, 1991. The Patriots Kent described were U.S. missiles launched to intercept usually off-the-mark Scuds that Iraq had fired at Saudi Arabia.

What does Kent recall about that moment now, when another U.S.-Iraq war appears imminent?

A good memory: “Suddenly we had a story falling on our heads, and we had the ability to report it in real time,” said Kent, in Los Angeles this week to do some work for the History Channel and take part in awards handed out by the International Documentary Assn. “I was trying to get their attention, because I knew in the control room they were watching about 40 monitors around the world, including the football game. I felt good that we did not make mistakes and we did not compromise security for anyone in that area when we reported the Patriots intercepting some of the incoming Scuds. You could see some of the debris explode in the dark and send up a glow.”

A bad memory: Kent’s adrenalin flash notwithstanding, it was no happy or productive time for Western media in Dhahran. They were far from the important action, in effect observing the war through the wrong end of a telescope, when seeing it at all. In fact, what Americans witnessed on TV through much of the conflict were not troops in combat, but favorable sky views of U.S. bombings and journalists in Saudi Arabia jumping for cover when sirens blew, usually in response to false alerts.

“We were about 200 miles away from anything even remotely approaching the front,” recalled Kent, famously nicknamed the “Scud Stud” that year because of his dashing good looks. “I always remind people that covering the Gulf War was not as dangerous for most of us as Tiananmen Square was, as Afghanistan would be, as Bosnia would be,” he said.

That wasn’t the media’s choice.

Not wanting to chance a repeat of home-front protests generated by unchecked TV coverage of Vietnam, the military applied the clamps in Iraq by conducting the war largely out of the camera’s view, contending that full disclosure could jeopardize combat plans.

“We were reporting under the strictest controls U.S. journalists had ever faced [during a war],” Kent noted. “The pool [reporting] system that hampered us in the first Gulf War should not be forced on journalists again, other than in exceptional circumstances.”

Although the Pentagon has been holding boot camps for reporters as war clouds again thicken over Iraq, and promises to have media “embedded” in combat units that take the field, Kent is skeptical. “They said they would do that before the Gulf War and before Afghanistan,” he said. “The biggest disappointments are always preceded by promises of cooperation.”

Which worries Military Reporters and Editors, an organization of mostly print journalists formed recently to lobby the Pentagon for greater media access to combat troops in wartime. Here’s the concept: Full and open disclosure is not only the democratic way but could help prevent a senseless conflict. Kent is a member of the group, which had its first conference last month in Washington, D.C.

“There has to be improved access,” said Kent, a Canadian who lives in London. “It’s the right thing, the intelligent thing to do.”

Not that media themselves necessarily do what’s right and intelligent, Kent is quick to point out. Although he’s spent much of his career reporting before a camera, he is a harsh critic of TV news.

“Newspapers responded to Sept. 11 and last year’s war in Afghanistan in splendid fashion,” he said. In contrast, the big broadcast news operations are more than ever slavishly tied to Pentagon and White House briefings. “So much of their coverage is led by the Washington perspective, which is mainly the Bush administration’s perspective.”

There’s nothing vague about Kent’s perspective. “The most galling thing about the Sept. 11 coverage,” he said, “was [U.S.] anchormen talking about a failure by American intelligence agencies. Who were they to talk? How many times were the network news organizations in Afghanistan [before Sept. 11]? Instead, look what they were passing off as news -- a nonstop diet of health stories, salacious innuendo, scandal surrounding the Chandra Levy tragedy and shark attacks.”

No wonder Kent is “Jaws” to his former employer.

His four-year association with NBC ended in 1992 during a nasty dispute that saw him bringing a breach-of-contract suit against the network, which settled with him out of court two years later. But not until it had played hardball by publicly calling Kent a coward for resisting an assignment to cover the war in Bosnia. Kent said he did so because NBC wanted him to go there without proper preparation and equipment.

The evidence supported Kent. He was always as much news stud as Scud stud, his long pedigree as a serious journalist speaking impressively for itself. At age 49, he has made several strong documentaries and spent more than two decades reporting from Afghanistan and other hot spots for the History Channel, PBS, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine.

His regular TV job now is host/narrator for “History Undercover” Tuesday nights on the History Channel, which from Jan. 14 to 17 will roll out a cluster of documentaries under the title “Beyond Desert Storm Week.”

It remains to be seen if a new desert storm is just ahead and reporters again find themselves responding nervously to sirens far from the main action. If so, this time Kent won’t be one of them.

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Where to tune in

“History Undercover,” hosted by Arthur Kent, returns to its regular 8 p.m. Tuesday time slot on Jan. 7.

“Beyond Desert Storm,” hosted by Arthur Kent, will be shown Jan. 14-16, 8-11 p.m., and Jan. 17, 9-11 p.m. The entire series will be repeated starting at 9 a.m. Jan. 19 on the History Channel.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.