For instance, look at the Islamic center controversy in New York. On the one hand, that’s a local issue. On the other hand it’s a national issue. And on the other hand, it’s an international issue. I’m trying to take all of these stories, all of these human dramas and national dramas, and point out the confluence of where domestic meets global. And I believe strongly there is an appetite and there is a window for that.
How big is the appetite?
I’ve never tried to compete with American Idol, whether I was at CNN or whether I’m here now at ABC. I think that’s a false dichotomy. I’m not saying news or international perspective competes with entertainment or any other mass audience program on television. But I strongly believe—and I know it to be true—that there are now markets for this kind of information. On TV, and especially in the news, there is a lot more niche marketing going on. Hopefully, I can step into it and fill that gap.
When it was announced you would be joining the show, there was some criticism that you weren’t the right choice—some of it implying your experience as a foreign correspondence, and your foreignness itself, made you inappropriate for a Sunday show. How do you deal with that criticism?
Yes, there was some negative carping about me taking this position. And I think that has died down. Let me be frank. I am foreign: I’m half Iranian, I’m half English, and I have an English accent. I was told when I first started in this business twenty-seven years ago that I had a name that would never make it in television, I had the color hair that would never make it on television, I had an accent that would not make it on American television, and that all-in-all I should basically pack up and think of doing something else.
Well, I don’t take no for an answer when I have an ambition and a strong belief. Nor do I roll over in the face of what some people say. I’m used to people having low expectations; and frankly I don’t think that’s a bad thing [laughs]. And I’ve always said, and I will continue to say, that I will simply let my work speak for itself. I’m not political, I’m not a performer on television; I am a journalist and I’m a reporter and I have been for twenty-five years and I continue to do that. And I say that there is still room for that, particularly on a Sunday morning, which is devoted to real substantive hard news. That’s why I felt I would try to make a go of it on this particular piece of real estate in the broadcast media. If I have a chance anywhere it’s there.
Your former network, CNN, has been struggling of late, while more ideological cable news channels Fox and MSNBC are enjoying success. What do you think of this trend in cable news?
The truth of the matter is that I left CNN, I left on extremely good terms, I started my career at CNN, I’ve been there for nearly twenty-seven years, and I don’t really want to talk about their programming or the situation in cable news right now.
Other than to say that I strongly believe that there is still space, whether it be on cable or on broadcast, for fact-based reality and the pursuit of truth—the pursuit of in-depth investigation and being there as a differentiator between the ideological left or the right. I strongly believe there is a place for that and that great journalism will triumph, that it still has an indispensible role in our world and in civil society. I’m on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where I chaired a panel between really heroic Mexican journalists who every day are putting their lives on the line to bring the truth about what’s going on in Mexico. Good journalism is alive and well, and it’s something that those of us who believe in it put our lives on the line to defend.
"newly-refurbished"? I thought -ly adverbs don't take hyphens in this case? Sorry, got distracted by this as I'm an editor. Now going to read the article.
#1 Posted by daniel mcmahon, CJR on Thu 23 Sep 2010 at 05:23 PM
Thank you Daniel. Fixed now.
#2 Posted by Joel Meares, CJR on Thu 23 Sep 2010 at 08:49 PM
Her guest list is impressive. Her questions are not. Please introduce her to John Sawatsky, http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=676, and the best show on Sunday morning will improve significantly.
#3 Posted by Christopher Frear, CJR on Sun 26 Sep 2010 at 08:43 PM
Amanpour has an impressive list of guests, and poor ratings. One reason could be seen in her show this last weekend. Amanpour interviewed David Axlerod and asked him why Americans didn't appreciate the "amazing" legislative accomplishments of Presidents Obama. Oh my. Hard hitting question, there.
Then, for comparison sake, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she repeatedly challenged him, asking him if the "fringe" and "bizarre" quality of GOP candidates wouldn't hurt Republicans in November. (I guess that explains why Republicans are expected to do so poorly in November) Later, when McConnell made the argument for extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, Amanpour claimed that such an action would add "trillions" to the federal deficits.
Later still, when her guest was Jordan's Queen Rania, Amanpour asked her to confirm that there was "sort of a dangerous Islamophoia" present in the US.
Amusingly, Amanpour claims in this interview that she brings no bias to her work. But she is one of the few people who doesn't consider her work biased. Even the Daily Beast, run by liberal Tina Brown, once put her on its list of the Top 25 Journalists of the Left. And she herself has admitted in the past to bringing a bias to her work.
She once told a reporter: "It drives me crazy when this neutrality thing comes up. Objectivity, that great journalistic buzzword, means giving all sides a fair hearing—not treating all sides the same—particularly when all sides are not the same. When you’re neutral in a situation like Bosnia, you are an accomplice—an accomplice to genocide."
One could cite many examples of her bias, including her widely panned 2007 "God's Warriors," which equated Judaism and Christianity with radical Islam.
#4 Posted by frank, CJR on Tue 28 Sep 2010 at 07:42 PM
I think that the urban chattering classes really believe they represent 'the center' almost by some self-referential definition, much as the Old Right in Europe up to the world wars felt that, as a class, it constituted 'the nation' in some metaphysical, White Russian way - no matter what the actual people who did most of the working and living and dying thought.
To be on 'the Left' is to believe History is on your side - so that opinions which may be statistically 'fringy' on the part of such true-believing modernists will be vindicated in the long run. Not unlike Marxists, they believe their opinions to be almost 'scientific'. The Tea Party strikes them as 'extreme' in a way that left-wing kooks do not because the Tea Party is resisting the tide of history. Such rhetoric has little or nothing to do with what real people think in the here and now.
Whether it is promotion of, say, same-sex marriage, or support of illegal immigration (and a general transformation of American culture into a sort of idealized view of the United Nations, or maybe just San Francisco or New York), or opposition to 'barbaric' practices such as capital punishment, or support for unrestricted abortion rights, or a disproportionate emphasis on 'environmentalism', or any number of views that remain distinctively those of an easily-identified urban/chattering class elite, the response of an Amanpour (Ivy League, Kennedy friend, multi-cultural, European by citizenship, and so forth) will be that even though her judgments about what is and is not 'extreme' are now statistically innumerate, the public will 'catch up' to her advanced viewpoints, and those of her class.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 30 Sep 2010 at 05:23 PM
There seems to be a deep misunderstanding and even ignorance to what kind of journalism Amanpour adheres to. Foremost, she has, until very recently, exclusively been an international correspondent for an international news network, meaning the only coverage of the US she has done is from a foreign policy perspective and the real ramifications that those policies have on the ground. Amanpour covers the entire world, and her understanding and perspective, as is her reach and recognition, is global.
This kind of reporter can be very hard to understand in the US because partly there is this serious lack of fact based reporting on international news and partly because we are so egocentric. We are so enamored with our own politics and political lexicon, such as “main stream media,” “liberal,” and “tea partier” that our inclination is to use an American label even when those labels simply do not apply. Amanpour is neither a liberal nor a conservative, and if she is perceived in the US as having more of a left leaning stance, it is simply because the world in which she reports, outside of the US, and it’s viewpoints are more progressive.
Regarding Amanpour’s famous quote about objectivity, it is true that she made that statement in response to a New York Times piece questioning her objectivity during the Bosnian War. In effect, it implied that she had “gone native,” or suffered from “Stockholm syndrome” from reporting on the front lines during the Siege of Sarajevo and was not able to effectively report both sides of the conflict. This was still when the world did not want to believe, and therefore have to act on, what was actually happening, which was genocide. What she reported was that it is was not simply an internal conflict and a civil war where all sides were equal, but that there were clear aggressors and clear victims. Her reporting made it impossible for world leaders such as the US to turn away with impunity and not stop what was, in fact, a genocide.
She is solely a fact base journalist, and disdains opinion that masks itself as fact or opinion makers and talking heads who mask themselves as journalists but are more aptly defined as entertainers. She has spent her entire career not sitting in a studio and simply reading the news, or even worse simply espousing an opinion on the news, but using boot leather of on the ground hard reporting in global hotspots and the royally bad places of the world to get the facts and cover the story. She strongly believes that is what true, fact based reporting requires. When covering things like war, genocide, and famine, time to make a formed opinion or a political stance is a luxury that a reporter like Amanpour simply does not have.
It is bemusing to read talk of ratings and what Amanpour will do to them, as if we as citizens and consumers of news are more interested in a news corporation’s well being than we are of getting that news unvarnished by any commercial interest. Amanpour has said that while she realizes networks such as ABC are ran as a business and can expect to receive a profit from their investments, she expresses a desire to return to the time when corporations such as Disney saw their respected news divisions as sort of the crown jewel of the much larger corporation and was modeled less as a business and more as a public service.
#6 Posted by Dean Brown, CJR on Fri 8 Oct 2010 at 03:38 AM
I thought I'd enjoy Christiane on This Week, but so far have not.Christiane should sit on her hands-they are in our face! And stop interrupting her guests! If Christiane wants to be giving her opinions all the time, she should be a guest, not a host.
#7 Posted by marian, CJR on Sat 27 Nov 2010 at 11:59 PM
I thought I'd enjoy Christiane on This Week, but so far have not.Christiane should sit on her hands-they are in our face! And stop interrupting her guests! If Christiane wants to be giving her opinions all the time, she should be a guest, not a host.
#8 Posted by marian, CJR on Sun 28 Nov 2010 at 12:05 AM