I know that this is hard, what I’ve chosen to do at ABC is hard, and for ABC it was a leap to bring me on board. But when you believe in something and you’re prepared to put yourself on the line and you’re prepared to take the slings and arrows and the criticism, all you can do is do your best and do what you believe in. That’s what I’m going to do and that’s what I am doing.
Objectivity is constantly being tested today by new technologies like blogs and Twitter, which encourage reporters to communicate directly and can then punish them for it, which is what happened with Helen Thomas and Octavia Nasr at CNN. Is there a new line that journalists have to be aware of in guarding their objectivity?
I don’t want to comment on Octavia because all of that happened after I left CNN, and I don’t [want to comment on] Helen either, other than to say… In general, we have to be doubly careful and redouble our ordinary journalistic efforts in the face of these massive and exploding platforms. And I think people make a choice these days. They choose either to remain objective and within the fact-based reality and the realm of objective journalism. Or they choose to bring more of their personality, more of their ideas, more of their opinions. I belong to the first group, and when I talk beyond objective journalism it’s basically to analyze [issues] based on my reporting experience—whether it’s about Iran, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever it might be.
I do think we have to be doubly careful, most particularly because I think two things are going on. In some instances, those people who stick cameras or tape recorders under our noses are not always doing it with the best of intentions. There’s a huge amount of “gotcha!” going on out there. But there’s also an immediate reactive mechanism happening so that what one says is doubly, triply, to the power of ten, magnified and amplified, and it becomes a huge crisis. I think that’s the unfortunate reality of the whole world we live in right now, including the world of journalism. We do have to be careful; we do have to remember who we are and what we represent, and where we fit into this exploding platform landscape. For me, it’s still about the content, it’s still about the journalism, and it’s still about the people. It is a profession, it does have rules, and it does have a framework within which we know our boundaries.
Some people want to jump on whatever comment is made and use it for their own political ends. We have to be careful about that too.
What’s the biggest story that we’re neglecting at the moment?
Mexico is a huge drama right on the border of the United States. There’s a narco-trafficking sub-state that’s taking over, it’s corrupting officials, it’s killing journalists, it’s killing civilians. This is a huge problem and it’s combined with the immigration issue and it’s an area where we can do a lot more work. But it’s very dangerous.
"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