NBC journalist resigns, blasting media as “defender of Washington and the system”
By
Bill Van Auken
5 January 2019
William Arkin, a veteran reporter and security consultant for NBC News, resigned last week with a scathing and lengthy email exposing the role of the network and the broader corporate media as stenographers and apologists for Washington’s vast military and intelligence apparatus under conditions of endless war.
Describing himself as “completely out of sync with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus,” Akin said, “I also found myself the lone voice that was anti-nuclear and anti-military.”
He clarified that anti-military for him meant “opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers.”
Arkin recounts that he had “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.” He is a military veteran who served in US Army intelligence in the 1970s and went on to become a military consultant for both Greenpeace International and Human Rights Watch. He also worked as a lecturer at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies for US Air Force officers and advised the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military and intelligence agencies.
In the early 1980s, he authored a book titled Nuclear Battlefields that revealed the locations where US and Soviet missiles were deployed, leading the Reagan administration to seek its suppression on secrecy grounds.
In 2003, working for NBC and the Los Angeles Times, Arkin exposed the bigoted anti-Muslim remarks made by a top military intelligence commander, General William…