The success of CNN is due not just to the vision of Ted Turner but to what Live from Baghdad identifies as the "guts and judgment" of Robert Weiner, who during the months leading up to the Gulf War of 1991 made a genuine broadcasting breakthrough which made CNN the world's premier station for late-breaking news. Live from Baghdad, directed by Mick Jackson, tells that story, based on the nonfiction account by Weiner. When the film begins, President George H. W. Bush is moving the United States closer to war with Iraq in 1990. Accordingly, Ed Turner (played by Paul Guilfoyle) assigns Weiner (played by Michael Keaton) to coordinate interviews and reports around the clock to focus on the crisis. Weiner's mandate is to fill television screens with news from Baghdad throughout the day, before the news broadcasts of the established networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Upon his arrival in the Iraqi capital, Weiner goes after stories that other networks are too timorous to tackle. For example, he authorizes rebroadcasting an unedited tape of Saddam Hussein's propaganda visit to a British family, confident that CNN observers in Atlanta will comment from the body language in the tape that the family is living in fear, that is, as hostages, though the other networks consider him to have capitulated to an Iraqi broadcasting directive. He next sets up an interview with an American resident who professes not to be fearful, even though the latter is later detained in a secret location. The most fascinating vigil occurs when he shows up for a 9 A.M. appointment with the Minister of Information from 9 A.M. and waits patiently until 5 P.M., while reporters from other news agencies come and go in disgust for not having their appointments honored, in order to prove his sincerity and willingness to respect the Iraqi government. The minister, Naji Al-Nadithi (played by David Suchet), then admits him to his office shortly after 5 P.M. Impressed that Weiner pronounces his name correctly, Al-Nadithi learns that CNN wants an hour-long interview with Saddam Hussein. Although a half-hour interview first goes to Dan Rather instead, Weiner persuades Al-Nadithi to grant CNN an hour, arguing that Iraq does not want war, which will come only when the talking ends. Not only does the interview occur, but Wiener and Al-Nadithi become friends. Without objection, Weiner listens as Al-Nadithi tells the Iraqi side of the conflict--that a British military officer one day after World War I decided to detach Kuwait administratively from the rest of Iraq (to simplify the British occupation of part of the Middle East under the authorization of the League of Nations) and that the only American motive for intervening is to control Kuwaiti oil. As a result of Weiner's fair-minded resolve, Minister Al-Nadithi allows CNN to be the only American news agency to enter Kuwait, where the crew films just what has been authorized--a denial by a hospital director of a phony story that babies have been killed by the invading Iraqi army. Just before Bush's January 15, 1991, deadline, veteran CNN war correspondents arrive, anticipating that the Iraqis will not pull back from Kuwait, including Peter Arnett, played by Bruce McGill; and John Holliman, played by John Carroll Lynch. From the CNN hotel suite, the war correspondents provide extemporaneous narratives to accompany film footage from the display of antiaircraft on the first night of the war and on the destruction observed the morning after, a first for television. (The film is dedicated in part to John Holliman, who subsequently died, though a dedication is also due to Peter Arnett, whom CNN fired in 1999 for reporting in 2001 on the American use of chemical weapons in Laos during 1970.) The film ends with a title noting that Al-Nadithi was the Foreign Minister in 2002, the year when George W. Bush began hectoring Saddam Hussein about his supposed duplicity over "weapons of mass destruction." MH

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Live from Baghdad: Making Journalism History Behind the Lines
by Robert Wiener

Live from Baghdad is the fast-paced story of Wiener’s adventures in Iraq during the period of tense international maneuvering that would culminate in open war. By turns suspenseful, irreverent, and inspiring, it is also a no-holds-barred inside look at how the media covered a simmering crisis.