Washington Viciously Back-Stabs Christiane Amanpour

Philip M. Stone March 24, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Even by Washington standards it’s sickly venom being aimed at CNN’s star foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour because ABC News signed her, and not an ABC Washington bureau insider, to mediate over its Sunday morning talk show.

Even Tom Shales, the very respected media correspondent for The Washington Post, plunged the dagger firmly in with, “From many angles, it was a bad choice – one which creates so much consternation that (ABC News President David) Westin will be forced to withdraw Amanpour’s name and come up with another ‘nominee’ for the job. That would hardly be a tragedy – considering how many others deserve it more than she does.” And the Web is full of negative reader comments, some really downright nasty.

It got to the point where ABC issued a statement defending its decision. “There has always been all kinds [of] fretful ink spilled about decisions we've made that ultimately turn out quite well for ABC News. If we are being accused of hiring one of the most well respected journalists in the world we proudly plead guilty and cannot wait for Christiane to focus her considerable talents on the Sunday morning landscape,” wrote Senior Vice President Jeffrey Schneider.

A lot of the nonsense seems to emanate because favored insiders at ABC News, including its White House correspondent, didn’t get the job. And there is a fear that Amanpour will internationalize what until now has been a pretty much a program concentrating on US domestic politics. That change would be really no bad thing.

This writer has been watching CNN International from Switzerland for some 20 years, watching Amanpour’s rise to eventually be CNN’s chief foreign correspondent. She is very good at what she does. And she has good top sources seemingly everywhere she goes. You knew that when she showed up on screen that this was a big story that would receive top coverage.

The tragedy for news junkies, but not for her, was that she got married and had a child and that rather crimped her on-screen reporting for far too long. She had agreed with husband Jamie Rubin, who had been Madeleine Albright’s press spokesman when she was US Secretary of State, that they would live in London for five years as her career progressed and then they would move back to New York. He showed up on various cable news networks in London giving US analysis, and Sky even tried him out anchoring a one hour international news program but it didn’t catch on and when the five years were up she kept her promise and the family moved to New York. And she, for the most part, disappeared from the breaking news coverage that she so excelled.

Sure, she reported from the New York studio on breaking international news, but that wasn’t the same at seeing her on-site; sure, she then made prize winning international documentaries but they weren’t the same as her “breaking” the news.  CNN International has fine news correspondents, but overall coverage declined by virtue of her absence on the scene. Recently she returned to international screens daily with her Amanpour interview show on international subjects. Those who complain she can’t interview should take a look at that show. She is well prepared and she asks the right tough questions.

And she has maintained her contacts -- perhaps because of her Iranian background it seems, for instance, that the most senior Iranian government leaders make themselves available for her questioning, and she pulls no punches. She doesn’t necessarily get direct answers – the Iranians are very clever at being long-winded and not answering what they don’t want to answer -- but at least she asks the right questions.  If the Iranian nuclear issue remains on the table she’ll be just fine and right in bringing that subject to the forefront of the American political debate, and that seems like the sort of thing ABC wants her to do – to widen the eyes of America beyond domestic affairs.

That’s something that badly needs doing. The US terrestrial TV networks have all cut back dramatically on their international presence. Watch the terrestrial evening newscasts and for the week you’ll be lucky if there is one international stand-up per night, even perhaps per week, unless an international calamity has occurred.

It is real culture shock living in Europe and watching, for instance, the top-rated NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams that shows live in continental Europe at half past midnight on CNBC.  It is domestic, domestic, domestic. Sure, if there is an earthquake in Haiti the stops come out for a while; sure, once in a while there is a report from Afghanistan – but not very often and when one remembers how the US networks had several on-the-front-line stories every night during the Vietnam war and compare that to the very scanty coverage today out of Afghanistan unless a fireman has been sent in to fly the flag, so to speak – that in itself is a telling story. It is not better TV as the networks would have us believe; it is cheaper, less informative TV about the world around us.

So with the US networks, because of their cost-cutting, emphasizing more and more less expensive domestic coverage it is encouraging and courageous that ABC has chosen a renowned international correspondent to take up the This Week mantle. It won’t hurt Americans to know there is, after all, a big wide world out there on which they see or hear very little about these days via their terrestrial TV networks.

You can argue whether ABC should have chosen an insider; you can argue whether it should spend  big bucks on Amanpour when the network is in the middle of a major cost cutting exercise with perhaps up to 25% of news staff getting the axe; you can even argue whether the show should be so internationalized; but the back stabbing that she is not up to the job is malarkey.