Christiane Amanpour: The Independent

Monday, July 10, 2006

Send to a friend
“She doesn't do froth”. Christiane Amanpour’s fearless war reporting is not the only reason why she has earned a formidable reputation in television news. James Silver put it to the test.

The chief international correspondent for CNN - a one-woman news tornado clad in a safari-style khaki jacket - has a reputation for not suffering fools (and ill-prepared interviewers) gladly...

Christiane Amanpour is a reporter who not only dodges snipers' bullets and grills presidents and militia leaders for breakfast, but one who was banned from Iran for five years after making a documentary about the country's reform movement which displeased the Mullahs and once publicly confronted President Bill Clinton over "flip-flopping" US policy in the Balkans. So woe betide the hapless hack who hasn't done his homework or bothered to check the transcripts.

On-screen "X Factor" is hard to define, but there's no doubt that, with her piercing eyes, glossy black hair, and perhaps the oddest accent heard on these shores since Loyd Grossman first appeared on Through The Keyhole, the multi-award-winning Amanpour has it in spades and is quite mesmerising on screen. But when my minidisc recorder is switched on and the interview gets underway, it becomes immediately apparent who's boss. And it isn't me.

Amanpour makes absolutely no bones about what she is prepared to talk about and which questions she will disdainfully bat away. It isn't evasiveness. She doesn't skirt around sensitive issues and give you a politician's sly half-answer. Rather, when faced with a question which displeases her, or one which she senses could embroil her in a row, say with a rival broadcaster, she simply shuts up shop.

When, for example, I ask her whether she considers flag-waving Fox News to be impartial, she replies: "I don't go there and you can quote me on that." When I mention a contentious statement by a well-known British reporter about the difficulties inherent in reporting in Iraq, she says bluntly: "Do you mind if I don't directly engage [that particular reporter]? That's that." Or when I ask her whether security personnel accompanying CNN correspondents in conflict zones are armed, she answers: "I prefer not to talk about that."

Then there's money. Towards the end of our encounter, I slip in a question about whether it's true that she is the highest-earning reporter on the planet. "I knew that was going to come up," she sighs, irritation momentarily flashing in her eyes, disguised with a million-dollar smile. "First of all, I don't know. Do you know my salary? Do you know anybody else's salary? It's a nice line but I have no idea. I have been out there, done my job, lived in all the situations a journalist should live in and I don't think it's relevant."

So there. When I assure her I would ask the same question of any other star reporter who was rumoured to earn megabucks, she says with ministry-of-information seriousness: "I know. I've read your cuttings."

I'm not sure she'd accept this sort of stonewalling from her own interviewees. In fact, I'm pretty certain she'd wheedle and bludgeon the answers out of them, presidents included.

But Amanpour, 48, doesn't do frippery and she doesn't do froth. In her view, foreign reporting verges on a religious calling. "Our mandate as [reporters] is to ask the tough questions, to report without fear nor favour and to be apolitical," she declares, thumping the table for emphasis. "I don't have an ideology, I consider myself a journalist in the truest sense of the world. I go out, I tell the story, I report and I come back. I don't sit behind a desk, I don't opine, I do my reporting and I have the pictures, the interviews and the facts to back me up."

Amanpour grew up in Iran and plainly has a particular affinity for the country. She has worked there many times and last September landed a very rare interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which she points out remains his only TV interview with a Western news organisation.

I wonder how difficult she finds it to work there? "In Iran, although you might call it a religious dictatorship, there is a far greater ability to operate than in, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq where it was impossible to do any meaningful, independent work unless you really managed to slip your minders, did it, got out and then published or broadcast," she says. "If you did it while you were still there..." she runs a finger across her throat.

"It's not the case in Iran for foreign journalists. You can go and talk to a whole range of people." Without being accompanied by government minders, I ask? "CNN doesn't operate with minders. We don't," she retorts. "There's a huge bureaucracy we have to go through with the ministry of culture and guidance. But I found that - partly because I am Iranian, I speak the language and I know the place -I have been able to operate on a level I find 75 per cent satisfactory.

"By and large we are able to broadcast live. Am I saying it's a perfectly open, walk-around situation? No, but basically none of the places I go to are like that."

Amanpour, who next week presents a documentary on the lost generation of Aids orphans called Where Have All the Parents Gone? as part of CNN International's Eye on Africa season, made her name reporting on the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. It's widely believed that CNN International - which is available in 190m households and hotel rooms in more than 200 countries worldwide - helped persuade the US government to intervene in the region.

Of that, she says: "If we did influence US policy, then it took us a hell of a long time. It was four years into the blood-letting in Bosnia before they intervened. I do accept there is something called the "CNN curve" or the "CNN factor", particularly when it comes to genocide, and so there should be. For our democratic leaders to watch the truth of what is reported in pictures and words and not to be affected, not to react, not to do the right thing, is immoral and unconscionable.

"Without intending to affect an agenda or be a political player - because I don't believe that is our role - but just by doing our job, by being there day after day, year after year, and showing the truth about men, women and children being sniped and shelled to death, besieged and starved just because they were a certain ethnic group, our leaders, in the end, decided to take the right course of action. What did they do? They stopped the war and put in a peace process that exists to this day."

Is there a point where detachment goes out the window when covering a story like that? "I'll put it this way. The line I draw is the following: Objectivity is our golden rule. But what does that mean? It doesn't mean treating all sides equally or being neutral. It means telling the truth. When there's genocide, there is no moral equivalence between the kid who is being sniped to death and the adult who has put on a uniform and looked through the sites of an AK47 to spray him. I'm not going to say: 'By the way, the sniper had a reason for doing it.' And the reverse is true. When we are not there to witness, terrible stuff happens like in Rwanda when 800,000 people were bludgeoned and macheted to death in 1994. Nobody intervened. That's what we're here for, those of us who take on this responsibility and work for powerful organisations whether it's CNN, ITN, BBC or Sky... Those of us who have this platform... we have to do our jobs."

But simply doing the job has become ever more fraught with risk. Nearly 50 journalists were killed around the world in 2005, with 21 more deaths so far this year. Why does Amanpour think this is? "The deaths have crept up since Bosnia partly because technology has enabled us to be seen doing our thing in real time in their real estate We enter their countries, these bad guys, we do our live reports where they can see us. The president's sitting in his office over there and we're busy shouting against him from the street round the corner. Or, worse, the militia leader is sitting in his cubby hole or café watching us via satellite doing our thing." She imitates gunfire.

"That's why [deaths are rising]. If you talk to my colleagues a generation before me who covered Vietnam or Beirut, there were dangers, but it was a different kind of danger.

"Today, those of us who do our job, who put ourselves into the zone of fire, are not just caught in the crossfire, we are being deliberately targeted as well. A double whammy."

Despite the grave risks posed by the insurgency, she says correspondents have a duty to cover Iraq. "It's extremely difficult and getting more difficult [in Iraq]" she says. "But we have to be clever and resourceful and do it in way which maximises their safety and ours. I go to people's homes, to schools and universities. I went to a radio station and talked to the journalists and listened in on call-in shows and got a pulse that way."

Her eyes are shining. "Iraq is the most important story of our time right now. It affects everything - the security of Iraq and the region, the rise of fundamentalism in the region, the rise in terror from the region, the way the US is perceived overseas, the way the US views overseas... almost the whole global politics is affected by this story. Yes, it's difficult to cover, but what's the other option? Not going there? You can't do that either."

Is there anything more TV news bosses could do to make their staff in the field safer? "They try very hard," she says. "Our safety is paramount. They are very good about giving us what we need in terms of hardware and protection. But there's a limit to what they can do, because our job is to go out and get the story, not to sit in a bunker."

Does she, for instance, think journalists should carry guns? "I don't have a gun. I don't think so." However, she clams up entirely when I ask whether security personnel accompanying the CNN reporters should be armed. I get the feeling it's time to change the subject.

There are no figures available for the number of Britons who watch CNN International, as the channel isn't a subscriber to the TV ratings body BARB. However, in the US domestic market, News Corp's Fox News, which bills itself as "America's newsroom" and is rowdily pro-George Bush, recently recorded its 18th consecutive quarterly prime-time ratings win over CNN. A bitter ratings battle rages between the two channels, which some US media critics claim has driven CNN politically rightwards in its quest for viewers.

Although she is clearly no fan of the rival channel, Amanpour steadfastly resists being drawn into Fox-bashing. "I'll say one thing," she smiles. "I believe we are the leaders in newsgathering whether it be domestic or international. And as a president of CNN has said, our job is to go out and gather the news, theirs is to talk about it."

There's a pause. It's clear she's done with the subject now and wants to move on. Is Fox too close to the Bush administration, I persist? "Fox News is very close to the Bush administration but that's not speaking out of turn. They admit it. They get all the exclusive interviews."

When Amanpour recently described the Iraq war as "a disaster" on CNN's Larry King Live, she was taken to task by the Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly for blurring the lines between reportage and commentary and having "a rooting interest in it being a disaster". What does she make of O'Reilly's comments? "My view is that he's wrong." (Later she clarifies that when she used the word "disaster", she was referring to "the post-war plan" rather than the invasion.) Would she accuse the Fox star of bias himself? "I don't go there," she replies. However, given that she once referred to "the [Bush] administration and its foot-soldiers at Fox News" while on CNBC, it's obvious how she really views the matter.

Born in London in 1958 to an English mother and an Iranian father, Christiane Amanpour's family left Iran after the Islamic revolution. She studied at the University of Rhode Island before working in radio, followed by a stint in the graphics department at her local TV station. In 1983, she landed a job at Ted Turner's fledgling cable news operation and has never looked back. "I was very, very lucky to fall into it," she says. "They happened to need untrained, eager foot-soldiers and CNN turned out to be a massive player and my boss turned out to revolutionise the medium. They helped me grow, I helped it grow - we're very intertwined, CNN and me."

When she first tried to break into TV, one news boss told her she had the wrong sort of looks to appear on camera. "I had long dark hair, a strong British accent and was slightly different," she says. "You had to fit in back then and I didn't. You had to be blond and Mid-Western with blue eyes. That was the paradigm in 1983 when I was starting out. But it's definitely changed."

She's suddenly very serious again. Women, she says, still face "a glass ceiling" in the TV news business. "There's a lack of women in senior editorial and management positions," she says. "I think it's about time that glass ceiling was finally shattered."

While working in Bosnia in 1998, she met and married soon afterwards the then US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin with whom she has a son, Darius. Has being married to a former Bill Clinton aide caused anyone to doubt her political impartiality, particularly in the US?

"Never," she insists. "Inevitably if you go back into the press clippings, when we got engaged, people asked a couple of questions, but it never went beyond that. It has never, ever in the eight years we've been married, been an issue. I accept people's right to ask the question, but there isn't a problem."

I wonder if Amanpour will ever tire of flying into the world's hot-spots, braced for bullets and bloodshed. Has she ever been tempted to swap war zones for the comfort zone and lure of the anchor's chair? "Not really, no," she says. "But I never say never to anything because the next move will be my husband's. He came to England for me."

Last year Rubin worked as an unpaid adviser to the John Kerry for President campaign. Rubin was made presenter of a nightly world affairs programme for Sky News, which impressed neither critics nor audience and is to be dropped.

Does he have plans to return full-time to the Washington fray? "Whatever he decides to do next, he'll do it and I will adapt," she says simply. Dutiful to a fault, but I get the sense she has no plans to mothball her khaki safari-jacket anytime soon.

(The Independent, July 10th 2007)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, July 10, 2006

Send to a friend

SITE MAP