CNN culls Baghdad bureau

It might be argued that CNN’s Baghdad news bureau was the essential part in the making of the 24-hour news channel. But that was then. Now, CNN has closed the bureau.

CNN’s staffers like Peter Arnett became international news celebrities on the back of CNN’s reporting out of Baghdad especially during the 1991 Gulf War when Arnett, his colleagues Bernard Shaw and John Holliman, and helped with their direct links with Atlanta, brought eyewitness coverage to the world in the most intense hours of the war during January 1991.

Two weeks into the war Arnett managed a unique interview with Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein.

CNN says that it will continue to maintain an editorial presence in Iraq through a dedicated team of CNN stringers and correspondents.