It is another morning when Barack Obama — still not officially president — is offering assurances that he can lead America out of the economic crisis, and Christiane Amanpour glances over her shoulder at the television in her New York office. For a television reporter who came to personify a world in crisis in the 1990s, covering the first Gulf war, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan for CNN, the reflex is understandable. The world’s economic meltdown is undeniably the story of our age.
But something is not right. “To me, this is a major global emergency, but somehow I don’t feel it in my gut,” Amanpour says, and plunges her hands into her belly in a mock seppuku. It is an astonishing admission for a reporter who, for nearly 20 years, has been known for bringing a sense of heart to some of the most horrifying situations on the planet.
It would be all too easy to attribute Amanpour’s sense of detachment from the economic crisis to her elevated status at CNN, where she rates a light-filled office with a fine view of Manhattan while less famous colleagues toil away in the windowless newsroom. Nearly two decades of frontline reporting and serious-minded documentaries, have moved Amanpour from the world of working journalist to one more usually occupied by celebrities and public saints. Her interviews are arranged by teams of publicists who flinch when she utters a single swearword.
Or perhaps that sense of dislocation could be down to Amanpour finding the big story on her own doorstep after years of trying to make viewers care about the misery of people in far-flung parts of the world. She moved to New York City earlier this year, the first time she has lived in the US in nearly 20 years — and will be putting down roots by hosting her own show.
Starting in mid-next year, she will have a nightly half-hour slot on CNN International. A one-hour version will be shown on weekends on the US version of CNN. The program does not yet have an official start date, title, or even a format, although Amanpour says she will still travel for the show. “I am not going to sit back and not be a reporter.”
That will be reassuring for many Americans who see Amanpour as their personal jolt of reality, a face synonymous with the reporting of serious events: war, disaster, famine, AIDS.
With the rich timbre of her voice and her accent — Amanpour has an Iranian father and grew up in Tehran and London — when the CNN journalist arrived on screen, she was decidedly different from the journalists Americans were used to seeing on television. She was a woman, for a start, and not a bland Midwestern blonde. She was the first big star to come out of CNN, which she joined in 1983 soon after graduating from college.
For many Americans, Amanpour’s arrival at a story wearing her take on the 1970s foreign correspondent safari suit — a boxy jacket with two large pockets over the chest — in itself still signifies what in CNN billing is known as “a major news event.”
Now Amanpour is 50. She has a son, who is eight, and a husband, James Rubin.
Motherhood made Amanpour more conscious of the risks of her job — but it didn’t stop her. Now when she goes out on a story, it’s with a little prayer. “I’ve said: ‘Please God, please God, let me get through this, I’ll never do this again,’” she says. “And then I do it again.”
But while Amanpour was moving from one big story to the next, journalism changed. For her, as for many of her generation who covered the war in Bosnia, no story since has ever come close. “The world really mattered,” she says. “I got the story in the A block of our news for day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and in the end so did people at ABC, CBS, NBC. So did people at the BBC. Our news environment was more open to this kind of storytelling back then and in the end it made a difference — and once Srebrenica happened it was a massacre too far and our Western governments ... finally got their act together and did something about it,” she says. “But they might not have done if we were not reporting it.”
For Amanpour, those days are gone. “I think the type of storytelling doesn’t exist any more. It just doesn’t.” The unrolling of the economic crisis on our television screens is arid and flat, she says. “There is a lot of jargon, there is no storytelling. I want to see the pictures of what is going on. I want to see the people. Storytelling is as simple as that.”
The notion of US power has also changed. In Bosnia, she was criticized by some fellow journalists for crossing journalistic lines in blaming the Serbs for the conflict and pressing for international intervention to end the war. Now the very notion that the US, as a superpower, has a duty and an obligation to intervene in times of human catastrophe, has been discredited by the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, US newspapers have been decimated by a plunge in advertising revenues, and journalist lay-offs.
All of that has affected storytelling, as has the rise of the Internet, which Amanpour sees as a leading culprit in the dying practice of serious journalism.
At a time when most members of the media are desperate to show their Web 2.0 smarts, Amanpour is defiantly unreconstructed. She does not use a BlackBerry. She hardly ever blogs. She does not Facebook. She is not even sure what Twitter is. “It’s a quality of life issue. I am a communicator. I need to talk to people,” she says.
It is hard to imagine Amanpour doing Britney Spears, or the soft-focus morning chatshow circuit. She is also a rarity in the hyperventilating world of US cable television. “I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality,” she says.
Despite this Amanpour has been upfront in criticizing US media for their insularity, and for not devoting enough space to foreign news. She also has a sensibility that is closer to that of journalists in Britain and continental Europe. “Objectivity is not treating each side equally, not drawing a false moral equivalence,” she says. “It’s covering all sides, giving all sides a hearing but not necessarily drawing false conclusions because if you do that in these kinds of situations, in my view, you’re an accomplice.”
Amanpour hopes to continue with the kind of journalism she has been doing — and if that doesn’t work she is prepared to find another way. “I am 50 years old now and I strongly believe in second acts. I don’t quite yet know what mine is,” she says. “I don’t know whether there will be a post-TV. The one thing I do know is that I ain’t going to be dragging some carcass around the world beyond its sell-by date.”
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