CNN Foreign Correspondent, Christiane Amanpour's face is so well known in war zones that during Kosovo, this headline became famous:

WHERE THERE'S WAR, THERE IS AMANPOUR!

“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.”

Amanpour on the change in the news:

"....the powers that be...the money men,
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."

"A long-time, and highly awarded colleague of mine, has gotten out of the business altogether, saying news and journalism died in the nineties."

-- Christiane Amanpour to RTNDA2000

http://x54.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=671083338&CONTEXT=969930602.1489109053&hitnum=1

Subject: Christiane Amanpour's RTNDA address - full text - LONG!
Date: 09/18/2000
Author: Alan Lloyd <noname@noplace.really>

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This was posted to Shop Talk today. I think it's definite food for thought for those of us who do anything at all relative to TV news. Have a good read...

=============================================================

Date sent: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 22:05:32 -0700
Send reply to: shoptalk@TVSPY.COM
From: Don Fitzpatrick <donfitzp@concentric.net> Subject: 09/18/00 -- ShopTalk
To: SHOPTALK@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU

DON FITZPATRICK’s

"SHOPTALK"

Monday September 18, 2000

http://www.tvspy.com/shoptalk.htm

“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.”

-- Christiane Amanpour to RTNDA2000

&&&&&&&&&&

Here's The Top of the Tube in Today's F*ST

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR ELECTRIFIES RTNDA2000 ATTENDEES

$$$$$$$$$$

(The following is the complete text of CNN’s Christiane
Amanpour speech to the RTNDA2000 conventioneers.

A regular edition of ShopTalk will return tomorrow, Tuesday
September 19, 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 landmine...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 passions 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 money men,
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...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.”

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E-mail distribution of ShopTalk on the Internet is made
possible by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications at Syracuse University

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