She has been described as the most well-known journalist in the world.
Her CNN BIO as Chief Correspondent for CNN International does not include the personal details listed in her reporter’s biography below the fold. Note to CNN, update this bio, Amanpour no longer works for “60 Minutes.”
Shortly after her birth in London, her father, an Iranian airline executive, moved the family to Tehran, where the Amanpours led a privileged life. At age 11 she was sent back to England where she attended first the Holy Cross Convent School in Buckinghamshire and then the New Hall School , an exclusive Roman Catholic girls’ school. Her family had to leave Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979. Christiane moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island. After graduation she worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, and in 1983 she was hired by CNN. In 1989 she was posted to Frankfurt, West Germany, and reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time. But it was her coverage of the Gulf War that followed Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 that made her famous. Thereafter she reported from the Bosnian war and many other conflict zones. Although contracted with CNN, she also occasionally appears on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
She speaks English and Persian fluently.
In 1998 she married James Rubin, who at the time was spokesman for the US State Department. A son, Darius, was born in 2002. CNN biography
In a recent Yale Bulletin interview Christine Amanpour says that unbiased reporting is not always noble.
Amanpour also discussed the concern that television news reporting has become sensational and narrowly focused on one issue, citing the Terry Shiavo case and the pope’s death as examples of what some might call “excessive” coverage. She expressed her own chagrin over the fact that corporate-owned television networks’ “first duty is to the shareholder,” and asserted, “the desire to eke out maximum profit from the news is immoral.” She contended that in this era of more emotional news reporting, “We in our profession are getting lazy about reporting facts.”
Equally alarming, Amanpour said, is that “lines are being blurred” between the news and politics. She decried both “paid shills who spout government programs and pass themselves off as independent analysts” as well as “various arms of the government producing their own news.”
More recently Amanpour has been in the news for quitting CBS television’s “60 Minutes.”
[…]She had been contributing to “60 Minutes” since 1996, usually four or five stories a year.[…]
Reached in London, Amanpour would not elaborate on her statement. People close to her have said she’s concerned that the type of hard-hitting international stories she’s done are not valued as much at “60 Minutes” as they were under founding executive producer Don Hewitt. […]Hewitt said that he’d never worked with a better reporter than Amanpour, “and I’ve worked with Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid.”
[Hewitt went on to say that she was brave and if he were still at CBS she would still be there.]
Amanpour is generally hated by the right wing, she was called a Clinton shill during his administration. From the blogs: They also hated her when she reported during the Iraqi election that she heard explosions but could not identify them immediately. They hated her when she said the new Pope was not catholic. When six months after the invasion of Iraq, in September 2003 she dared to comment on the position of reporters on the ground in Iraq.
“I’m sorry to say that, but certainly television – and perhaps to a certain extent my station – was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.”
Asked by Brown if there had been any story during the war that she had been unable to report, Amanpour said: “It’s not a question of couldn’t do it, it’s a question of tone. It’s a question of being rigorous. It’s a question of really asking the questions.
“All of the entire body politic in my view – whether it’s the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever – did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels.”
For those comments, Amanpour was reportedly summoned to a “private conversation” with CNN news chief Jim Walton. A FOX News spokeswoman responded to Amanpour’s charges — apparently in all seriousness — with this creepy soundbite: “It’s better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than [as a] spokeswoman for al-Qaeda.”
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/03/09/18.html
Recently she said this about reporting from Iraq:
“Behind the backs of the field reporters, field producers and crews on the ground our bosses made a deal with the establishment to create `pools’, what I call `ball and chain’, handcuffed, managed news reporting.” (There was a 12 page contract signed by those bosses on the behavour of journalists.) It appears that rarely do journalists voluntarily leave “60 minutes” – the last time it was done was in 1991. So the story of why Amanpour has quit is continuing. It seems that CNN international does not come under the intense scrutiny from “bosses” or advertisers that the home version does. What’s ahead for Amanpour if the US invades Iran? We live in interesting times.
