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TV REAL
By Anna Carugati
Christiane Amanpour is CNN’s chief international correspondent and the anchor of Amanpour, a nightly foreign-affairs program on CNN International. She is also the global-affairs anchor for ABC News, where she provides analysis of important issues of the day and anchors prime-time documentaries. In her 30-year career as a journalist, she has interviewed most of the world’s top leaders and has reported from every major news event and hot spot, winning dozens of awards. She talks to TV Real about her new show and her commitment to impartial and accurate reporting.
TV REAL: In your new show, Amanpour, what topics do you want to address? AMANPOUR: CNN’s brand is solid around the world and it’s synonymous not just with breaking news but with fair and accurate news coverage and with credible and trustworthy journalists. It is a 24-hour news network, which means that a lot of it is in a newscast format with live reports or [developments] happening that day.What I hope to do, and build on the program that I had in 2009–2010, is to, obviously, tackle the top issues; obviously, get the best interviews that I can with the most senior leaders or the most relevant players on that particular topic; but also go behind the headlines and do more in depth, [offer] a different perspective, seek voices that don’t automatically appear on every other show on every other network. And look,
let’s be frank, it is difficult; we live in a complete proliferation of news networks, of different platforms, and many [news programs] go after the same people. So we see the same people all the time, against the same background all the time, saying the same things all the time. I’m not so caught up in my own self that I think that I’m going to somehow reinvent the wheel.We obviously want the most relevant political leaders and military leaders, but also some culture as well. I often think that so much is said about a society and about our times through modern culture, and even looking back at ancient culture. That’s the kind of thing that I hope to do: current affairs, get behind the headlines, try to broaden the perspective, and definitely not take it just from a U.S. perspective, even though we are in the U.S. and CNN is an American company.Ted Turner broke the mold, blazed the trail with CNN International. And not just that, by really hammering into all of us, from the lowest level to the top level at CNN (this was 1985; I had started about two years before) that we don’t say the word “foreign.” We are not political activists, nor are we a bastion of nationalist sentiment. We cover the news and we do it with a global perspective. And especially for myself, who has grown up abroad. For me that is second nature: to get multiple perspectives on all sorts of important stories. TV REAL: You were working for CNN for 27 years, you went to work with ABC, now you’ve come back to CNN but you are still with ABC. How are you going to make that work? AMANPOUR: With great skill! I am very proud to have been a pioneer, in terms of getting the first-ever dual contract in the U.S. In 1996, I worked full time for CNN and CNN International, but I was also a contributor to 60 Minutes, the greatest magazine program in the history of the world. I was really proud to have had that unbelievable opportunity to work for two of the great geniuses in our business. One is Don Hewitt at 60 Minutes and the other is Ted Turner at CNN. It was also incredibly rewarding and it was actually a very good fit, because my deal with 60 Minutes allowed me to air the incredible pieces that I did on CNN International. I took an incredible opportunity to join one of the major Sunday morning broadcasts on a broadcast network, This Week on ABC, which is still an area of real estate on the broadcast landscape that is devoted to serious news. And it was to fulfill my mission, which is to bring more global perspective, more international views and news to a big and important American audience. CNN has a very big and important audience: they are the opinion leaders and the thought makers and the policy makers, while a broadcast network [reaches] people around the country. I strongly believe that certainly this country, the U.S., cannot have a functioning, coherent, mature and consistent foreign policy unless it has an informed citizenry. I believe that people in this country deserve to have at least some information about what’s going on in the rest of the world and what their own leadership is embroiled in, because this is a democracy. It feels right to be back in the global conversation that I started as a reporter 20-plus years ago.
Christiane Amanpour
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