Emmy Award-Winning broadcast journalist Arthur Kent is the host of History's Mysteries, Monday through Thursday at 8pm ET on The History Channel®.
Arthur Kent, whose live satellite broadcasts for NBC News during the 1991 Persian Gulf War brought home the victories and tragedies of war, has covered conflicts from Afghanistan to Bosnia. Mr. Kent won two 1989 Emmy Awards for his coverage of Tianamen Square in China and the anti-Ceaucescu uprising in Bucharest. Following his tenure at NBC News, he was host for two seasons of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's respected documentary series, Man Alive.
Arthur Kent's career in television, radio, and print journalism has ranged from solo filming expeditions in zones of conflict, such as Afghanistan and Bosnia, to coverage of major breaking news stories around the world as a member of large network news teams. A graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada with a combined first-class honors degree in journalism and history, Kent began his television career in 1973 at CJOH-TV, Ottawa's CTV network affiliate. In 1976, he joined the news service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, eventually moving to his home province of Alberta as a correspondent for The National, the CBC's principal evening newscast.
In the early 1980's, Kent traveled and produced news and current affairs specials from Asia and Europe as an independent correspondent and cameraman. In 1986, he began filing special reports jointly to the CBC, America's NBC News and the Observer newspaper of London. This arrangement continued through the watershed international news years of 1988 and 1989, when Kent photographed and reported his way from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the former Soviet Union and China. In August 1989, as communism began to crumble across Eastern Europe, Kent joined NBC News as the network's Rome correspondent.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War vaulted Kent into instantaneous reporting via satellite -and into the debate over the restriction of free news coverage. Criticism of the various forms of official censorship is one of the themes of his book, Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars, which was published by Penguin Books Canada in September 1996 and June 1997 in the United States by Interstellar. The book features the story of Kent's successful legal battle with the management and the ownership of NBC over the tabloidization of news programming and explores the issue raised by the case. Risk and Redemption and its authors were chosen to participate in the National Press Club's annual authors' night and the book has been generously reviewed by leading American commentators such as David Halberstam, Walter Cronkite, and Norman Corwin.