BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | With "Risk and Redemption," Arthur "Scud Stud" Kent's new book detailing his successful megabucks lawsuit against NBC, the raffish reporter is remaking himself in the image of media-monopoly critics like Norman Solomon and Ben Bagdikian. During a talk at San Francisco's Freedom Forum last month, he barely spoke of Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia, where he's made his career covering war zones. Instead, he spent 45 minutes railing against the decline in standards at NBC under the reign of General Electric -- "the evil empire" -- and the giveaway of the digital spectrum to the big three networks.

"Don't you know you're being robbed?" he exhorted his sparse audience. "You're not just being poorly served, you're being robbed. The airwaves belong to you, the consumer. Will you allow people like [General Electric CEO] Jack Welch to pick the nation's pocket for the enrichment of his elite management team and his shareholders?"

Just a few months ago, at a talk at UC-Berkeley, Kent's former colleague Tom Brokaw glossed over General Electric's influence at NBC News. Kent had harsh words for him. "What Tom is really doing is creating a smoke screen so that General Electric can further tame the news," Kent said. "He sees nothing wrong with abandoning standards of excellence at NBC. He has no sympathy with the public interest."

Brokaw had said that NBC cut back on its foreign coverage because there's just not as much going on in the world now as there was in the late '80s. To that, Kent retorted, "It is inconceivable to me how anyone who's been in the business as long as he has, who makes $7 million a year, could be so utterly out of touch with reality. It's one of the problems when an anchorman so thoroughly signs on with the corporate agenda. He should be ashamed." Kent said that Welch runs NBC like a "casino boss, just worrying about the numbers." He continued, "Shame on them. There are good brothels to run if all they're interested in is money. They should get in on the boom in soft-core pornography."

Kent himself doesn't have to worry much about money these days. He sued NBC for $25 million after being suspended from his job on "Dateline," and though he can't reveal the amount of his eventual settlement, he called it "terrific" and "a delightful amount of financial compensation." With it, he's moved to London and started his own documentary company, Fast Forward Films.

From the way Kent describes the incidents that led to his lawsuit, though, what really propelled him wasn't the cash, it was the attack on his masculine pride. During the last days of his employment at NBC, Kent had his lawyer contact the heads of NBC News over a breach in his contract -- he had been transferred into the general assignment pool, despite a clause in his contract stating that if he were moved from "Dateline," it would be to the position of senior European correspondent. In what Kent believes was a dangerous diversionary move, his bosses told him to go to Bosnia immediately, without making any safety preparations or giving him time to make them himself. When he refused, he was suspended and locked out of his office and the computer system. But worse, the NBC publicity machine called him a coward.

"In order to evade its contractual obligations," read Kent's lawyers' press release announcing the suit, "NBC attempted to destroy the reputation and career of a world-renowned war correspondent by deliberately sending him unprotected and unprepared to front-line war-zone danger and then accusing him of cowardice for declining such a suicide mission."

To the man who once dreamed of growing up to be James Bond, it was the ultimate insult. Kent had earned the macho moniker "Scud Stud" while reporting live for NBC during a Gulf War Scud missile attack in Dhahran, and though he tries to paint himself as a reluctant sex symbol, his prose and his posing suggest otherwise. At the Freedom Forum talk, a six-foot-wide screen flashed pictures of the intrepid reporter posing jauntily in war-ravaged locales across the globe. One slide showed him donating the leather jacket he wore on-camera during his Gulf coverage to the Newseum, a media museum in Virginia (introducing Kent, Félix Gutiérrez of the Freedom Forum compared the jacket to Wonder Woman's leotard). As Kent said to me when I questioned him about the pin-up-boy slide show, "There's nothing wrong with being a star reporter, as long as you're still a reporter."

Kent's writing also betrays his 007 fantasies. He describes the judge presiding over his suit against NBC: "From my seat at the back of the courtroom, all I could see up there was glistening light-colored hair, long nails like red talons, and steely bright eyes that dared any lawyer to mumble or lose his train of thought or waste her time in any other way."

Still, while Kent lays on the bravado a bit thick ("We humbled GE, let me tell you. The corporate culture needed to have a lesson taught to it in ethics and law"), his David and Goliath routine is ultimately satisfying and not entirely unjustified, even if he does swagger a bit too much.
SALON | Feb. 6, 1998 

Michelle Goldberg is an editorial assistant at Salon.