Will ABC Let Amanpour Be Amanpour?

[alp227]

by Eric Alterman

In choosing Christiane Amanpour to host This Week, ABC News has done something not only right but also brave. Giving the show to a tireless reporter with an avowed commitment to "make foreign news less foreign and link it with domestic policy" puts ABC in a position to break open a paradigm for the Sunday interview programs that has held sway since NBC's Meet the Press began in 1947.

The appointment must have come as a shock to the cozy world of Washington insiders, who would have been much more comfortable with one of their own, such as network correspondent Jake Tapper, Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran or former Bush adviser turned ABC analyst Matthew Dowd. In reporting Amanpour's hiring, Politico's Michael Calderone correctly observed, "It's an unlikely moment for a host lacking experience in covering Washington politics to take the reins, and another reason the hire struck some staffers as coming out of left field." Unlikely and decidedly welcome. Amanpour's entire career stands in almost perfect contrast to the increasing "Politico-ization" of the news, with its laserlike focus on what happened five seconds ago and what that will mean for the next fifteen minutes.

Typically, the Sunday shows function as a corollary to a David Broder column or a Sally Quinn dinner party. While ABC's recent roundtables have expanded the political universe ever so slightly--offering seats to liberals like E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel--your typical Sabbath Gasbag understands that he must stay in the Cokie Roberts/George Will safety zone of conservative conventional wisdom.

--snip--

Amanpour has spent the past twenty-seven years in a different world entirely. At CNN, she has famously occupied herself not with moronic insider gossip but with war, famine and mass rape. Profiled in 1994 in The New York Times Magazine, Amanpour could be found pitching a tent next to the airstrip in Goma, Zaire, having flown in from Port-au-Prince. Describing how "bodies littered the ground for as far as one could see in any direction" amid the overpowering "stench of rotting flesh and human waste," reporter Stephen Kinzer aptly concluded, "Like perhaps no other reporter on American television, Amanpour seems to belong in such places."

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100412/alterman

"moronic insider gossip"? :rofl:

[Captain Hilts]

1. No. Women hosting mainstream news shows get tarted up and dumbed down. nt

[Birthmark]

2. Amanpour is the best.

I may actually watch TV willingly.

[MissDeeds]

4. +1

She is better informed than most of her guests. Perhaps that may not be in her favor... Ms Amanpour is excellent and should not compromise her expertise or integrity to appease the network nitwits.

[Birthmark]

5. I don't think that she'll compromise on anything important

From what I can tell, integrity and honesty are hard-wired into her. Coupled with her intelligence and courage, she's the best in the biz, imo. The only problem she might have is that she'll nail the spin-meisters to the wall and they may try to avoid her. But I imagine she can nail them just as well using video clips and quotes. :)

[Jim Sagle]

3. Translation: Will they let her spew antisemitic filth out of her rotten mouth?

My guess is they will. :puke:

[hulka38]

6. She's married to a Jew.

Recalibrate you're antisemitism detector if you can't keep food down.

[Jim Sagle]

7. Must suck to be him.

[court jester]

17. Pravda would blush- She's married to James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman

for the US State Department, since 1998. And she was married to him
while she claimed to be a reporter. This is what we used to be told
happened in the USSR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Amanpour





Conflict of Interest?

[hulka38]

18. You're off point. How does any of that make her antisemitic?

[Recursion]

9. Translation: she considers Arabs fully human. NT

[Jim Sagle]

10. Bad translation. Better translation: 'Jewish diamond merchants, oogah boogah!'

[ensemble]

11. hmmm...

Like playing cards, I see. ;)

[BlueMTexpat]

14. Robert Eisenman, is that you?

From Wiki:

... Amanpour was criticized for her CNN report "God's Warriors: The Jews." Robert Eisenman wrote an extensive critique of that program on the Huffington Post.<10> Eisenman referred to Amanpour using "bald statements nurturing present propagandistic fantasies." He attempted to deconstruct Amanpour's factual and logical errors,<11> however, there were several factual errors in Eisenman's critique (including saying the name "Palestine" didn't exist in Ottoman times despite its origin in the fifth century B.C., and claiming Palestine was a Class B League of Nations British Mandate when it was in fact Class A). ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Amanpour#Criticism

*********
Amanpour is a good and decent journalist. Shame on you!

[Jim Sagle]

16. She is neither. Shame on YOU!

[amandabeech]

8. I think that it's great that she will have a show on a network

where everyone can see her.

However, I can't see her covering the domestic scene as well as others who have been doing it for so long.

Maybe she jumped because CNN has gone over to that neocon zealot Fareed Zacharia who should avoid covering domestic stories. He's completely clueless on the national scene.

[pundaint]

12. I like what I've seen of her, and I am hopeful. Will any changes be made to the chucklehead

chorus of regulars too? Maddow doesn't make Gregory palatable, when she guests.

It would be nice for someone to make America aware that there is a larger world, and some good ideas out there.

[Enthusiast]

13. Actual substance?

I think not! We can't have it-unacceptable.

[hvn_nbr_2]

15. Is something weird going on at ABC?

There have been several times in recent weeks that ABC actually told a real news story and told it fairly honestly. Is something odd happening at ABC? Does the network of "The Path to 9/11" have a mustard seed of integrity growing inside it somewhere?