PETER Arnett has landed on the Internet.
The veteran war reporter, who left CNN last month after 18 years, has been named the chief overseas correspondent for foreigntv.com, a soon-to-be launched on-line news service.
“It’s simply about building,” Arnett told The Post yesterday. “I’ve always been a builder. I helped build the Saigon bureau for the AP, I helped build CNN and I’m happy to help build foreigntv.com.”
CNN almost fired the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist last summer over his role in the Operation Tailwind fiasco, in which a CNN report alleged that the U.S. government used nerve gas against its own troops during the Vietnam war.
The story eventually led to a retraction, a much-publicized apology, several lawsuits and its producers being fired.
Arnett exited CNN “amicably” last month after several reports surfaced that the all-news cable network was going to freeze him out of the last two-and-a-half years of his five-year contract.
Now Arnett will be the marquee name for the fledgling news service.
Foreigntv.com, which will not be fully operational until next February, hopes to broadcast original English-language news programming, gathered from bureaus worldwide, on-line in a video format.
Arnett said he is confident that his skills will translate to the medium, and doesn’t see the switch from TV news to the Internet as a step down.
“I felt the same way when I left the AP after 20 years,” Arnett said about his leap from print journalism to CNN in 1981. “I had colleagues that deplored that fact that I was going into cable television.
ForeignTV.com recently filed papers with the FTC for a $10.2 million IPO. The company is headed by a group of entrepreneurs, most notably Al Primo, the former news director for WABC/Ch.7’s “Eyewitness News.”
Primo, 63, has been credited with inventing the format that is now used by almost every local news broadcast in the U.S. He was also the news director responsible for pairing Bill Beutel with the late Roger Grimsby on Ch.7 more than 30 years ago.
“The skill I have, I’d like to think, is being a reporter,” Arnett said. “That’s what the AP hired me for, that’s what CNN hired me for and that’s what Al Primo has hired me for.”