Sad as it is for me, so far I have never met Christiane Amanpour. But I fondly remember those days when I was one of the copy editors in the VOA newsroom in Washington (that had a TV on every desk) — there was an understanding among all writers and editors to yell “Amanpour Alert” as soon as she appeared on the TV screen with an upturned collar and a safari jacket as rugged as the terrain of Afghanistan in the background. As soon as the alert was sounded, everyone in the newsroom switched to CNN. She was not only young and beautiful, but also confident, courageous and fearless.
She’s “a whole lotta woman”, as they say in America, and a gutsy war correspondent. The New York Times once declared, “Where there’s war, there’s Amanpour”.
Raised in Iran, Amanpourwas schooled in London (where her family fled to in 1979 because of the Islamic Revolution led by late Ayatollah Khomenie), then studied journalism at the University of Rhode Island in USA. She joined CNN in 1983, and first got noticed for her 1985 report on Iran, which won the coveted DuPont Award.
But it was her coverage of the Bosnian crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the first war in Iraq that catapulted her international recognition. Besides her coverage of such key international events, Amanpour has interviewed many of the world’s top leaders, including Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair and France’s former prime minister Jacques Chirac. She also conducted the first interview with King Abdullah of Jordan.
During her distinguished career, Amanpour has won nine Emmy Awards so far and countless other honors. Besides her role as CNN’s Chief International Correspondent, she has also worked for CBS News on their award-winning program 60 Minutes as a reporter, for which she won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. In March 2010, after 27 years, this is how Amanpour announced her departure from CNN: “This is our final broadcast, and I want to say what a privilege it has been to have had the opportunity to report the news to you all over the world, from all over the world. I have tried to be your eyes and ears in pursuit of the truth and the stories that beg to be told. That’s been my mission in the field and here in the studio.”
She had left CNN to host This Week on ABC network. The show was about domestic politics and Amanpour’s image of an international reporter didn’t go well with the audience. After less than two years she left the show and went back to CNN to host one of its new shows on international affairs. Such was Amanpour’s clout that she managed, for the second time in her career, to negotiate a deal that allowed her to work on two networks at the same time. The first time it was in 1996 that she was signed to both CNN and CBS’s 60 Minutes and the arrangement continued until 2005. And this time it was CNN and ABC. So even if she joined CNN, she did not leave ABC and promised to host occasional news specials for that channel. It was during the first Gulf War when Amanpour really entered the American living rooms — and America’s national consciousness. A few years later, it was Amanpour, more than anyone else, who refused to let the West ignore the atrocities in Bosnia. For nearly two decades, she brought clarity and context to the crises in Iraq, Bosnia, Darfur, and the Balkans. She became known for her honest efforts to provide an objective context and perspective to each one of her reports. Did being a woman in the man’s world help Amanpour or hinder her? She was quite candid about it in an interview with the Harvard Business Review.“It’s been nothing but an advantage. It’s allowed me to get my foot into places where men have not been able to. I will say, however, that there is a dearth of female leadership in this business. I’d like to see a woman president of a news network. I think that women are making massive strides, and I’m very gratified with my position, with how I’ve climbed the ladder, but I still lobby on behalf of all the women who work alongside me and are coming up after me. They need to be treated equally. They need to be paid the same as men — equal play, equal pay.”
For me, Christiane Amanpour is a symbol of how focused a journalist should be about what he or she wants to do. Even before she joined CNN as a reporter, she knew that she wants to be a foreign correspondent and not just a reporter. She pursued her dream meticulously even before she got a chance to work at CNN. What we can learn from her is that if we want, even today journalism can be a “passion” and not just one of the professions.
(Author/analyst Ravi M Khanna worked with VOA as South Asia bureau chief and desk editor in New Delhi and Washington for over 24 years)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
