Christiane Amanpour is arguably the most gifted and well-known journalist of our time, but the first time I ever heard her name it was not on a breaking news report, an interview with a controversial leader, or even on a CNN promo; it was on Gilmore Girls:
Rory Gilmore: I want to go to Harvard to study journalism and political science.
Headmaster Charleston: On your way to being?
Rory Gilmore: Christiane Amanpour.
Headmaster Charleston: Not Cokie Roberts?
Rory Gilmore: No.
Headmaster Charleston: Not Oprah, Rosie, or one of the women from The View?
This short exchange, while confusing an entire audience of teenage girls as to whether or not ‘Christiane’ was actually a name, also illustrates the basic principle of the Amanpour journalistic brand: Christiane Amanpour is a hard-hitting international correspondent, not talk show hostess masquerading as a reporter.
For the past three decades, Christiane Amanpour has been a well-respected and astoundingly prolific force for keeping the world informed on some of the most controversial and important events of the age—war in the Middle East, genocide, and natural disasters, to name a few areas of her expertise. Her oft-quoted commendation, first said by Walter Rodgers, is that, “she gives great war…the best war in the business.” What sets Amanpour apart from her fluffier colleagues is her willingness to report on these events from the ground, often hitching rides with Black Hawk helicopters to be taken right into the middle of a war-zone in the interest of exposing what is really going on. She covered the Bosnian crisis in Sarajevo and alongside the Srebrenica victims, filmed location segments in the Persian Gulf War, and broadcast her show Amanpour from Port-au-Prince in the days following the 2010 Haiti earthquake; she puts herself in dangerous situations so often that a flak jacket has become part of her expected wardrobe.
In the studio, Amanpour goes toe-to-to with some of the world’s most intimidating leaders in interviews that aim to expose the truth of their administrations. Her most famous was probably the heated 2002 phone interview she conducted with Yasser Arafat as his compound was being attacked, but Amanpour has also discussed rising authoritarianism with Paul Kagame, the release of political prisoners with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the effects of the Soviet Collapse with Michael Gorbachev, and, perhaps most fearful of all, the war in Afghanistan with Nancy Pelosi.
This phenomenal willingness to do whatever it takes to force people to see truth has won Christiane Amanpour international acclaim; in addition to enough Emmys to count on two hands and multiple Peabody awards, she was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2007. Amanpour spent 20 out of her 27 years at CNN as the Chief International Correspondent, leaving the well-respected network only to take an even more high profile job as the host of ABC’s Sunday morning program This Week.
Clearly, Christiane Amanpour has enjoyed an illustrious career in international journalism. But is she who we would consider a public intellectual?
Breaking down the term, the answer is an obvious yes. Christiane Amanpour and her career are, by nature, public; not only was she the globally-syndicated face of CNN foreign journalism for two decades, performing high-profile and exclusive interviews as well as on-the-scene reports, but she has been interviewed herself by colleagues such as Lesley Stahl and John Stewart. Amanpour also has pop culture cache, demonstrated by her cameos in Gilmore Girls and, more recently, Iron Man 2. While she hasn’t amassed a ridiculous number of degrees like many other public intellectuals, she graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Rhode Island and is trilingual in English, Farsi, and French. And, honestly, her British accent would probably convince us all that she is brilliant even if she never finished middle school.
So at the end of round one, she meets the qualifications of being public and intellectual. But the criteria for actually being a public intellectual is a bit more rigorous than that; to officially earn the title, the person in question should use their exposure and expertise to further an agenda. As a journalist technically committed to reporting just the facts in a fair and unbiased way, can Christiane Amanpour even have an agenda to push? Or does this non-partisan ideal forfeit her from the competition, forcing her to resign to simply being the world’s highest paid and most respected foreign correspondent?
Well, if Amanpour had her way, yes. When asked, she has maintained that she masks her own biases and sympathies in the interest of telling an objective story; as she told Lesley Stahl, “I am not part of the current crop of opinion journalists or commentary journalists or feelings journalists. I strongly believe that I have to remain in the realm of fact.” In an interview with the Guardian, Amanpour teased us as to what her biases were by answering Julie Ferry’s question about her ideal future. However, the response could not have been less revealing:
"If I was queen of the world? I would do everything I could to bring rapprochement between the Palestinians and the Israelis in the case of Islamic and Jewish extremism. I would also try to encourage democracy in a way that doesn't necessarily come by being imposed by the gun, but is helped by a democratic world that understands each nation and culture is different and that democracy won't look the same everywhere. In the case of extremism you need brave politics and brave politicians who need to understand the greater good and not to play to the people who scream the loudest."
Christiane Amanpour showed us her idealism, but nothing of her biases. She remains steadfastly tight-lipped as to what her actual beliefs are, and it looks like she doesn’t intend to break that silence any time soon.
However, there is a vocal population within the US (which, despite the international bend of her work, has always been her target audience) that considers her to be too liberal or anti-Israel. The concerns about her supposed liberal bias, stemming largely from her passing complements to Hillary Clinton and her defense of Obama’s Nobel Prize, are a bit ridiculous for two reasons. The first is that, while she certainly has spoken out against conservative American leaders, she has been equally hard on their liberal counterparts; she spoke out against the censorship of journalism under the Bush administration, but was equally hard on Clinton in regards to his foot-dragging during the Bosnia crisis. Secondly, up until her recently acquired ABC gig, US partisan politics were not relevant to the majority of her work. For the first 27 years of her career, Christiane Amanpour reported on stories that, while important in the US, existed outside of the traditional liberal-conservative split; when she reported on conditions during the genocide in Rwanda, she really did give just the horrifying facts rather than push a political agenda. In reference to her experiences in Bosnia, Amanpour says of herself, “We didn't have an agenda; we just put the pictures on air of the terrible things that were being done to human beings.” She criticized American but mostly foreign leaders not for their domestic politics, but for their international, and thus less party-charged, mistakes. Now that she is hosting a Washington-centric news program that will force her to deal with domestic issues and the liberal-conservative chasm, her biases may become clearer. But she’s been helming This Week for only six months, so, as the Magic 8 Ball would say, this is a question we will just have to ask again later.
The more substantial accusation of agenda pushing is the anti-Israel, or at least too-lenient-on-Islam, one. While many had lamented this assumed bias for a large part of her career, Amanpour really came under fire for her 2007 report God’s Warriors, which equated Jewish and Christian fundamentalism with their Islamic counterpart. Some of the tamer critics accused it of being unintentional propaganda, while this headline appeared in the comments of Daniel Pipe’s blog: CNN's Jihadists apologist & Jew-hater: Christiane Amanpour's FAKE 'Jewish warriors.' These criticisms are huge exaggerations that assume that just because she is not pro-Israel she is automatically a journalist carrying out a Jihad over the airwaves. The accusations of being against the Jewish faith are ludicrous considering that her husband, James Rubin, is Jewish and they held two wedding ceremonies—one in the Catholic tradition and the other in the Jewish tradition. It seems to me that Amanpour is actually relatively neutral on the subject, instead seeking to provide the US news media with a perspective in the post-9/11 world that doesn’t paint all Muslims as terrorists. Her need to do this is also understandable from the perspective of her heritage; half-British and half-Iranian, Amanpour’s family lived in Tehran until fleeing during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. And honestly, Christiane Amanpour is doing us a service in this respect. As consumers of the American news media we are so often exposed to reports that are markedly anti-Islam and full of the same stereotypes; Amanpour reminds us that citizens of Muslim states are also victims of religious violence—Islamic or otherwise—and that the dangerous fanatics are only a small part of any faithful population. She aims to provide us all with objective facts so that we can make the necessary judgments for ourselves, free of her influence.
And that is the agenda that qualifies Christiane Amanpour to be a public intellectual--the agenda of knowledge proliferation. She is not pushing a political ideology or a stance on a political issue, but rather the idea that knowledge is power. That sounds nauseatingly cheesy, but it is a very necessary mission. By putting herself literally in the trenches of the news, Amanpour fought her own war against ignorance during her international correspondent years; now, as the anchor of This Week, she probes world leaders for answers as to what is going on behind the scenes. Her endgame is not to convince us to vote one way or the other but to actively seek unbiased truth, information that we must have before we can understand others or enact any kind of positive change in the world. As always, she said it best herself:
"I think that as a country that is so powerful, so good in its values, so determined to spread values such as democracy, morality around the world...it's absolutely vital...that the people of the United States get a look at what's going on outside. It's our role and it's our job to be able to go to these places and bring back stories, just as a window on the world."Christiane Amanpour is a public intellectual. But rather than being one who shoves a partisan agenda down our throats or gives factual commentary so biased it can barely be distinguished from fiction, she gives us only the truth and has faith in us to do what is appropriate with it.
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