Christiane Amanpour in her own words

This is a briefing of Christiane Amampour's lecture at the Edward R. Murrow Ceremony, if you are interested in the entire text, please email me and I will gladly send it to you.Although six years old, her views are visionary and spot on over the controversy of the news media industry in the USA. It also brings light to life on the road as a war correspondent. At least for me, it is a must read for those interested in journalism. I hope you will enjoy it.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
Edward R. Murrow Awards Ceremony RTNDA2000
Minneapolis September 13, 2000

I remember the day I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, my bicycle and about 100 dollars… It was exciting… a band of young college graduates thinking we'd get some practical experience on the job, hoping it would be a steppingstone to the big leagues. Little did we know it would become the big league... Because I am foreign I was assigned to the foreign desk. I kid you not.
I was just the tea boy really, but I quickly announced innocently but ambitiously that I was going to be a foreign correspondent.

I am sorry to say my first boss was a woman… if I had thought I would get a sympathetic hearing, some female solidarity, I was sorely mistaken. She hated me… made fun of my ambitions and basically said I would never make it at CNN…all character-building stuff. Well I worked my way up through every level…writer..producer...field producer…reporter…I managed to convert a few believers in management, and here I am.

We thrived on the pioneer spirit of CNN…we adored being the little network that could….we loved the fact that we were mocked as chicken noodle news… as we kicked ass all over the world. We were thrilled and privileged to be part of a revolution…because make no mistake about it...Ted Turner changed the world with CNN. Not only did he create 24-hour news, and all that has meant, he truly created the global village.

As corny as that may sound, nothing has been the same since. With all my youthful exuberance and all my high-faluting dreams...nothing really prepared me for the intensity of the work I have done over the past 10 years. I was an adventurer…I thought CNN would be my ticket to see the world, and be at the center of history…. On someone else's dime.!!!!! Well, it was… and I did… but soon the reality of the business I had chosen began to sink in.

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was…I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of the 20th century. I am so identified with war and disaster that wherever I go these days. People joke….or perhaps not…that they shudder whenever they see me: Oh God... Amanpour is here… is something bad happening to us?

U.S. soldiers…with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance… joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next. I calculated that I have spent more time at the front than most normal military units.

I have lost many friends, to the sniper, the mortar bomb, the land mine…the crazed Kalashnikov-wielding druggie at the checkpoint. It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past ten years living in a repressed state of fear. I very rarely talk about it because it is impossible to talk about….but I ask you tonight whether anyone in this room knows what it must be like to live on fear…fear of being shot…of being kidnapped, of being raped by some lunatic who hates your stories or blames you for bringing NATO bombs down around them.

We manage the fear, but the strain takes its toll. And then there's the horror of what I have seen…in Rwanda piles of bodies lifted by bulldozer and dumped into mass graves. In Bosnia little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child. In Somalia and Ethiopia, walking skeletons. And always the weeping….children, women, even men. These images and sounds are always with me.

Yes I have often wondered why I…why we… do it? After a few seconds the answer used to come easily: because it matters, because the world will care once they see our stories…because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad guys will win. We do it because we are committed, because we are believers.

One thing I knew for certain…I never could have sustained a relationship while I worked that hard, or was that driven by the story… Indeed in the full flush of journalistic conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility to at least stay alive. That was seven years ago.

I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son. Before my son was born I used to joke about looking for bullet-proof Snugglies…Kevlar diapers…I was planning to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent…. but now When I think of my son…and having to leave him…and I imagine him fixing his large innocent eyes on me and asking...mummy, why are you going to that weird place…what if they kill you…I wince. I know what I want to say…I want to say because I have to…because it matters…because mummy's going to tell the world about the bad guys and perhaps do a little good. But a strange thing has happened…something I never expected….motherhood has coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it…I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job…it'll even see the light of air…if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.

More times than I care to remember I have sympathized with too many colleagues assigned like myself, to some of the world's royal bad places. They would go through hell to do their pieces…only to frequently find them killed back in New York, because of some fascinating new twist that's been found on I don't know…..killer Twinkies or Fergie getting fatter, or something. I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories that people have risked their lives to get.

My son was barely two months old when two of my best friends and colleagues were murdered in an ambush in Sierra Leone. …I was devastated and really angry…does anyone even know where Sierra Leone is? If not, why not? How many of you aired their footage? It made me think long and hard about what we do...I asked myself why do I still do it? Do I have anything left to prove? Am I a war junkie? Why do any of us do this? There are of course a lot of reasons….mostly a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for…this is the business we have chosen. If the storytellers give up, the bad people will certainly win.

I am not alone in feeling really depressed about the state of the news today. A veteran BBC reporter, with supreme British understatement said recently …news is heading down rather a "curious corridor." A long-time, and highly awarded colleague of mine, has gotten out of the business altogether, saying news and journalism died in the nineties. Now I do not share that much pessimism…but something has got to change. All of us on this room share in this most ludicrous state of affairs. So much so that I recently carefully clipped the following cutting and just about slept with it under my pillow….WBBM-TV in Chicago is going back to basic journalism! A rare example of dog bites man actually being news!!!! I don't dare ask how this radical experiment is doing in the ratings….all my fingers and toes are tightly crossed.

You get the point….the powers that be...the moneymen, have decided over the last several years to eviscerate us. It actually costs a bit of money to produce good journalism….to travel, to investigate…to put on compelling viewing. But God forbid they should spend money on quality…no, let's just cheapskate our way into the most demeaning, irrelevant, super-hyped, sensationalism we can find. And then we wonder why people are tuning out in droves…it's not just the new competition, it's the drivel we spew into their living rooms.

David Halberstam…recently wrote that journalism today is basically tailored to the shareholders. Perhaps all of you are raking in the profits…but let me throw down a challenge: what's the point of having all this money if we are simply going to drive ourselves into the ground? Makes you wonder about all those mega-mergers. Yes, you are running businesses but surely there is a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent. We live in a society after all, not a marketplace. News is part of our communal experience…a public service.

Surely a news operation should be the crown jewel of any corporation…the thing that makes a corporation feel good about itself. We all love "Millionaire," make your money off that….make your super-dollars somewhere else. Leave us alone, with only good competitive journalism as our benchmark. I know I do not need to remind you of all the quality programs that make money too…60-minutes, Nightline…are just a couple. No matter what the hocus-pocus focus groups tell you, time has proven that all the gimmicks and cheap journalism can only carry you so far.

Remember the movie "Field of Dreams" when the voice said, "Build it and they will come." Well, tell a compelling story and they will watch. Lest you think these are woolly-headed musings …we are not dinosaurs…we are the frontier. You've mastered the hardware…we are the software. And that will never change. Today's buzzwords seem to be content, and platforms. Well, we produce the content for all your different platforms…and that will never change. Humble newsprint, the New York Times, still rules the world. As someone else might have said, "It's the content stupid." You've invested so much money in technology…perhaps it's time to invest in talent…in people…do you know how many people in newsrooms I know have a hard time even recognizing news anymore….

I am personally thrilled by the changes at CNN, because it means we are responding to the times. I'm sure we will regain our unique niche, stop trying to be all things to all people, and find our way again to doing what we do best, what we alone can do…gather the news first, and send it
out the farthest.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, but I work all over the world, where people actually see us as serious players. They take journalism seriously because they know what a force it can be. In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran, Yugoslavia, journalists play a critical role in civil society…they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies. Russia's new president Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on silencing the voice of independent media, unless they toe his line. When he failed the test of leadership and lied to his own people when their nuclear submarine sank. It was Russian journalists who exposed the Kremlin's double talk and KGB-style propaganda: Russian journalists revealed there were in fact no survivors, no-one was hammering on the inside of the hull…Russian ships were not in fact supplying oxygen to the stranded crew, as officials repeatedly claimed.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press. So powerful in fact that now the hard-line mullahs have cracked down, and closed down the outspoken new journalists. I am proud of the work western journalists did spurring action…eventually…in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, bringing the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia to light...getting those people help…. often our words and pictures are their only opening to the world. And there is so much good stuff being produced here in the United States….but think how much more of a contribution we could make to this great society if we weren't so dependent on what those hocus-pocus groups tell us people are not interested in…oh Americans don't care about serious news…oh Americans don't care about this presidential election….oh Americans don't care about foreign news. Oh Americans don't care about anything but contemplating their own navels. It's just flat out not true… what Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they are too stupid to know the difference. That's why they are voting with their off switch.

For example, why are we terrorizing the country at large leading with murder and mayhem when crime is actually on the decline? Why have we given George W. Bush such an easy ride...until now, that is...when actually his qualifications are questionable? The way the mass media treats the democratic process here must have a lot to do with the reason so many Americans are alienated from it. That's bad for the greatest country in the world, who seeks to project her values and beliefs around the world.

I'm part English, part Iranian, and I have always had an outsiders' respect for the American people…. The way I tell my stories reflects that. It seems simple to me...if we have no respect for our viewers…then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do….it's time the cost-cutters, the money-managers and the advertisers gave us room to operate in a way that is meaningful, otherwise we will soon be folding our tent, and slinking off into the sunset. No new media vehicle has ever killed off another….it's the age of interactive, yet newspapers, radio, television, are all still here. But we the people are in danger of doing what no new technology has ever done, becoming extinct. Only we can stop it.

I recently came across the following quote from the indomitable Martha Gelhorn…wife of Ernest Hemmingway (though she hated to be introduced that way) and war correspondent par excellence: "

All my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple.I don't need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women, concerned with the welfare of the planet, and its least protected inhabitants. I plan to spend the rest of my years applauding that fellowship and cheering from the sidelines….good for you never give up."

I still have many years left in me, but that's what I'll tell my son when. he's old enough to torture me with painful questions…I'll tell him I am a believer and I believe that good journalism, good television, can make the world a better place. …..and yes…I believe good journalism is good business.

Anderson Cooper Headed to Iraq?

The word on the street is that CNN's Anderson Cooper is headed to Iraq in the next couple of weeks. Hey, I was fine sending John Roberts...not so down with sending Coop. Although, that might mean more face time for Michael Ware and I do love his reporting...

Reporters in Iraq face snipers, roadside bombs and kidnappings

By DAVID RISING
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ Western journalists covering the war in Iraq face sniper fire, roadside bombs, kidnappers and a host of other dangers. Their Iraqi colleagues must cope with even greater risks, including families attacked in retribution for sensitive reporting, and arrest on suspicion of links to the violence journalists cover.

At least 85 journalists -- mostly Iraqis -- have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- more than in either Vietnam or World War II. The security situation is getting progressively worse, and 2006 has been the deadliest year yet, with at least 25 journalists killed to date.

Gunmen carried out the deadliest attack yet on the media on Thursday. Some two dozen armed men, some in police uniform, stormed the downtown Baghdad headquarters of a new satellite television station, killing the board chairman and 10 others.

The motive for the attack on Shaabiya TV was not clear, though there were signs it was carried out by Shiite militiamen. Sunnis say the militias often have help from police. In its few short broadcasts, the station played nationalist music against the U.S. occupation, perhaps prompting militiamen to assume it sympathized with Sunni insurgents.

"Iraq is the most dangerous assignment in the world right now for journalists," said Joel Campagna, head of the Mideast desk of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media rights group that keeps the count.

"There really aren't any battle lines. The danger begins right outside your door," he said.

Covering any war is dangerous, and journalists have been killed or wounded in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and other recent conflicts -- in addition to 66 in Vietnam, 17 in Korea and 68 during World War II.

Western journalists have been targeted in Iraq by insurgents who consider them little different from combatants. Baghdad's Palestine Hotel -- where many media organizations, including The Associated Press, have been based -- was attacked several times including in a triple suicide vehicle bombing last October claimed by al-Qaida in Iraq.

On Wednesday, the body of a Kurdish radio reporter was identified at the Baghdad morgue. Azad Mohammed Hussein was abducted Oct.3 in Baghdad while on his way to Dar al-Salam radio headquarters, and his body was found dumped on Tuesday.

One of Iraq's best-known television journalists, Atwar Bahjat, and two of her colleagues were abducted and slain while reporting on an explosion in February at a mosque in Samarra.

Not all the threats faced by Iraqi journalists come from the insurgents.

In September, Kalshan al-Bayati, whose reporting had been critical of security forces in Tikrit, was arrested twice by the Iraqi army for alleged terrorist links, and remains in custody.

AP photographer Bilal Hussein was detained in April and remains in U.S. custody without any charges against him.

According to CPJ, at least eight journalists have been detained for weeks or months by Iraqi and coalition forces. They include employees of CBS News, Reuters, the AP and Agence France-Presse among others. At least four of the detentions have exceeded 100 days, Campagna said.

In the early months of the war, Western journalists could move about in relative safety in cities like Baghdad, Mosul and even Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit armed with nothing more than a notepad and a pen.

Before the resumption of commercial flights, most journalists arrived in Baghdad by car, either traveling north from Kuwait or east from Jordan along a route that took them near current insurgent hotbeds such as Ramadi and Fallujah.

All that changed in 2004 with an increase in violence, kidnapping and slaying of Westerners. Journalists from the United States, Poland, Japan, Italy and France were kidnapped or killed.

In January, Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was abducted by Sunni extremists and freed unharmed 82 days later.

With security in a free-fall, news organizations have taken on extra measures to protect their staff while still reporting as best they can on a complex and violent conflict.

Some journalists, including most freelancers, have left the country. Those news organizations that remain use a handful of U.S. and other Western staffers and rely heavily on their Iraqi reporters, who venture out to the scenes of bombings, suicide attacks and gunfights at great risk.

"The Western reporter has some training on how to cover events in hot areas -- he has better knowledge on when to appear and when to vanish, when there is a danger while covering the news," said Qais al-Azawi, chief editor of Baghdad's al-Jareeda newspaper.

"Moreover, the Western reporters have better protection equipment such as flak jackets. The Iraqi reporters do not have such privileges," he said.

Western journalists, including those from The Associated Press, often live and work in guarded compounds, most outside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. They venture out to report but usually with armed security escorts.

Security measures to protect staff have driven up costs.

Dexter Filkins, who spent nearly three years covering Iraq for The New York Times, said in a recent talk that his newspaper goes through money like "jet fuel" to protect its reporters in Iraq.

With travel sharply limited, many news organizations, including the AP, periodically embed reporters with U.S. military units. But the number of embeds has waned in recent months from hundreds at a time in the early months of the way to an average of 15 over recent weeks, according to Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman.

Out in the field, non-embedded journalists are often at scenes of violence and are regularly among the first people there, which can lead to confusion, Johnson said. Insurgents are also known to take videos and pictures of their own attacks to use as future propaganda, and Johnson said soldiers are well within their rights to detain people at the scenes of violence to ensure that they are truly journalists.

"It's a very, very difficult environment and we would rather have our troops be safe by detaining and questioning somebody on why they are there, than let them go and find out they were complicit," Johnson said.

Al-Azawi, the chief editor of al-Jareeda, said in a telephone interview from Paris he is spending more and more time at his home in France for his own safety.

"The warring factions in the country do not respect any law that calls for the protection of the journalists," he said. "Journalism is the most dangerous occupation in Iraq now."

Before you email another marriage proposal to Anderson Cooper, do you really want to have a War Reporter as your Significant Other?

Melanie Anstey is married to a high profile foreign correspondent.She is a freelance documentary maker, and now works for the Rory Peck Trust in London.

Married to a War Reporter
Melanie Anstey

'If your husband is in constant danger, you end up living on red alert, and therefore you put your own needs last.'
My husband has reported on just about every single war. Since I met him 19 years ago he has been in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Gulf War One, Israel, and then in 1991 he went to Croatia where he was shot through the abdomen. He ended up being operated on by a bunch of very nice, chain-smoking, Serbian surgeons.
It was shocking, very distressing and very, very frightening. When I received the phone call, I did not know whether he was going to live. I dropped everything — ironically, I was producing a film about Medicins Sans Frontieres, in London — and his TV company flew me out with a replacement reporter and a close friend. They also flew out a surgeon from a specialist London hospital, more for my sake really.
The situation was so critical I went into adrenaline hyper-drive. I have always wondered how people cope in these situations, but to be honest, you have to. You go into this weird state of lucidity, and you do whatever you can to make sure that he gets proper treatment. When he was well enough to travel we brought him home to University College Hospital for a week, and after he came out he was on morphine for three months.
I gave up work to look after him, but it was far too serious to be pissed off about the situation. I was also lucky because I had fantastic employers who were very understanding. However, I did lose the job I was working on — it was my first producing opportunity. But the situation with him was so grave it did not occur to me respond in any other way.
We had major rows about him going back into foreign correspondent work. I understand it was important for him to re-establish his courage and his capacity for doing the work. He had dreamed of doing this job since he was a kid, so to give it up would be a major decision for him. Nor am I an ultimatum person — I have never pushed it that far.
Then in 1998 he got a near fatal illness in Baghdad. I had to go to Jordan, get him from there, and take him to a hospital in Israel. It was touch-and-go again, and we had to go through the whole recovery process once more. This time he even had to learn to walk again.
I realise now that I coped less well this time, because I had to fight every step of the way for him to get the right treatment, for his illness to be recognised and for him to be rescued in time. I was very tired and I had run out of resources, especially as I had other personal pressures to deal with.
Of course I have been traumatised by what has happened, but it is not a trauma that is commonly recognised. If your husband is in constant danger, you end up living on red alert, and therefore you put your own needs last. You forget to remember to look after yourself. You don't live a normal life; you don't think, 'What is my career path' or 'How am I getting on with everybody in the office' or 'When is my sister's birthday?'
Maybe I have always been bad at dealing with 'normal' things like that anyway, because you cannot blame events for your own personality traits. But there may be an element by which you have never been allowed to get bored. You are put into a kind of limbo state that revolves around what is happening to him. He's going away. He's coming back. He's injured. He's fine. He's tired.
During the Iraq war he went to Baghdad for three months and that was terrifying — to the extent that I had to stay indoors more or less continually for the three weeks watching those reports on television. I simply could not function any other way.
The pressure was so intense I would go out the door and start shouting at people — and I actually had one road rage incident. It was the day that the bombing was to start and I had taken the car to the garage. For once I would NOT give in to a white van man who was trying to barge his way past me. I had a furious row with him — and then I said to myself, 'Go home!' So I just stayed at home for three weeks. But in a way it became almost normal behaviour. I have a lot of Arab friends, and also a friend who has an Iraqi aunt in Baghdad — my friends couldn't go out either.
I am very afraid of him being killed — there is constant anxiety, the constant awareness of danger. But I can't think of it in the abstract when he is at home in London. He is such a home-loving, cosy person. You wouldn't imagine that somebody who does this work could be so relaxed and able to enjoy themselves.
I think experiencing trauma like this takes the relationship to a deeper level. Your bond becomes more intensely, mutually dependent. Whether that's a good or a bad thing I don't know. But even so, there are all sorts of pressures that are very difficult to deal with. One of them is absences, long absences, the coming in and out of each other's lives and trying to find common ground.
There's a big difference between being on a technicolour story and the coming home. It can feel drab in comparison. So you have to find strategies for reconnecting. Obviously it can make you feel second-rate because you cannot compete with wars and world events; you cannot compete with the importance of a war.
Also, you cannot say, 'Actually I need you home because I haven't seen you for a while', if you feel that lots of Kosovans, for example, are being persecuted and somebody needs to tell their story. It makes you subjugate your needs to your own detriment. So, being with someone who is high profile can be diminishing to the identity of the partner, and it can be difficult for you to represent your own needs strongly enough within the relationship.
I think anybody in a similar relationship faces the same difficulties. It is this huge sense of dislocation; of perhaps not sharing experiences in the way that a normal couple might, because you do not see each other as frequently, and because your experiences of life are very different.
I've been very dependent on friends to help me cope with what has happened, and how to deal with a relationship that presents such stresses and strains. I also started therapy about five years ago, partly because I was looking for a way to change professions. I found it interesting, but I think those who have been the most helpful are people who have lived through similar experiences. It's healing to talk to someone who truly understands, and to be able to tell the story time and time again. It helped me to put what happened into perspective.
I do believe that partners are co-conspirators, so I cannot say I have had a hard time because my husband's been a war correspondent for x-amount of years. What's made us stay together? A deep bond and common interest in the same sort of things, and lots of shared experiences. But above all, our friendship.
I think we have succeeded in being together for 19 years because I have a commitment to what he does. I have a commitment to the right news stories being told, and told well. Making social anthropological documentaries is my way of doing it because I don't like the pace of news, and sometimes I feel there is an over simplicity of news. I like the more ponderous, contemplative pace of documentaries. I like going right inside a community to present issues from the inside.
Although we've had a terrific relationship it hasn't allowed us to settle and to have children. I am sad about that. But, I knew I could not get neurotic about documentaries in Iraq when I'm supposed to be at home looking after kids.
Having said that, I am becoming increasingly aware that I need to change my priorities. I've run out of my capacity to cope with living separate lives. I have also run out of the energy that it takes to reincorporate him back into my life. I have decided the sacrifices were becoming too great to carry on as we are. So we are making changes to accommodate what we now both want from our relationship. I want to be more settled, and we have talked about this extensively.
On the other hand, I am very independent kind of person. I always have been like that and, as a result, aspects of this relationship have suited me very well. When I have had a documentary series to produce, I have been able to work obsessively. As a result, I deliver good results. And I know that if I had a husband who sulked every time I worked late it would have caused a lot of trouble, career-wise.

Recently Melanie and her husband have been approved for adoption in the UK, and are now planning to adopt a child from Russia.