For journalists worldwide, Peter Arnett has been a role model for intrepid reporting. Thrown out of Indonesia in the 1960s for his dispatches; a Pulitzer Prize for courageous reporting from Vietnam in the 1970s; and as the only western TV journalist in Baghdad during the Gulf War, his reports for CNN gave the cable news station a worldwide reputation and sent its viewership ratings soaring.
Yet this week Arnett sweated it out for five hours at CNN headquarters in Atlanta while his bosses debated if he should be sacked for his role in a discredited documentary claiming that the US used an outlawed nerve gas against deserters in "Operation Tailwind" in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Two producers of the programme, Valley of Death, have been sacked and a third forced to resign after an inquiry found that it "ignored or minimised" evidence contrary to the producers' "deeply held beliefs". Arnett, who narrated the programme and did several interviews for it, was given a "reprimand", but many colleagues at CNN feel that it was only his reputation which saved him.
It is not a good time for investigative journalism in the US. The Cinncinati Enquirer has had to apologise three days running for a series accusing Chiquita Brands of skulduggery on its banana plantations and has paid $10 million in an out-of-court settlement. The reporter, Michael Gallagher, has been fired for stealing Chiquita voice mail which he used to back up his claims.
Stephen Glass, a star reporter on the weekly New Republic, has been sacked after admitting to fabricating all or some of 27 articles. Patricia Smith, a prizewinning columnist on the Boston Globe, has been fired after she was discovered making up "quotes" to illustrate some of her articles.
The founder and editor of a new magazine to monitor the media, Brill's Content, has caused uproar in the journalistic establishment with a 29-page article about sloppy reporting of the Monica Lewinsky affair by some of the top names in the Washington and New York newspapers and TV networks.
So it is not the finest hour in American journalism. The case of Peter Arnett has especially shaken admirers of his former distinguished work. For Arnett himself it has become a nightmare.
The CNN programme was eight months in the making and included 200 interviews. It was used to launch a new CNN/Time flagship programme, NewsStand, which would, it was hoped, revive the cable station's flagging ratings. But nearly all the work was done by the producers and Arnett was only brought in to give it a high profile "face". He narrated the script and conducted several interviews. He also was by-lined in the accompanying article in Time for which the magazine has apologised.
But when the storm broke and CNN and Time were forced to grovel and retract the claim that the US used sarin nerve gas in 1970, Arnett's distancing himself from the programme angered some of his high-profile colleagues like Christiane Amanpour. Arnett said that while most of the research was being done, he was reporting in Iraq or giving lectures.
"I was part of the team but I didn't have supervising authority . . . They [the producers] gave me the list. I asked these questions. The producers took the tape and I was gone. I was the face," Arnett said this week.
But MS Amanpour takes issue with him. "I believe, contrary to what Peter Arnett appears to believe, that a network correspondent should be responsible for what he or she says on the air. I believe that we have our face, our name, our voices and our credibility and therefore we should be responsible" for such reports, she told the New York Times.
Arnett is relieved to have his job still but admits that "my reputation has taken a major hit around the world.
"I can understand that young people feel I have somehow betrayed their trust."
But just as journalists were hoping that the worst was past, out comes former White House correspondent for Time, Ms Nina Burleigh, with an admission that she was "quite willing to let myself be ravished" by President Clinton after she believed he admired her legs during a trip on Air Force One.
Ms Burleigh - now a freelance journalist - recounts in Mirabella magazine that after she had been playing cards with the President during a trip to Arkansas, "I felt incandescent. It was riveting to know that the President had appreciated my legs, scarred as they were. If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room at the Jasper Holiday Inn, I would have been happy to go there and see what happened."
Ms Burleigh also writes that "I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion illegal."
No, it is not a good time for journalism in America.