Nothing comes close to Bosnia
on 01 Dec 2008
| 1
Christiane Amanpour talks to
The Guardian about her upcoming TV show,
The Amanpour Hour, in the United States. The Guardian describes the CNN foreign correspondent through American eyes,
For many Americans, Amanpour's arrival at a story wearing her take on the 1970s foreign correspondent safari suit - a boxy jacket with two large pockets over the chest - in itself still signifies what in CNN billing is known as "a major news event". link
Amanpour laments the loss of storytelling in much news reporting of the modern day. Bosnia, she says, marked something of a golden age in foreign news reporting,
"The world really mattered," she says. "I got the story in the A block of our news for day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and in the end so did people at ABC, CBS, NBC. So did people at the BBC. Our news environment was more open to this kind of storytelling back then and in the end it made a difference - and once Srebrenica happened it was a massacre too far and our western governments, after showing a deplorable failure of collective will, finally got their act together and did something about it," she says. "But they might not have done if we were not reporting it... I think the type of storytelling doesn't exist any more. It just doesn't." link
Her hubris is so sweltering that I could grill a sandwich on the amount of times she thinks she's saved the world. Of course if her ilk are saving us and we only lost a mere 250,000 lives in the Balkan wars, then there it appears that they'll be saving Iraq quite soon as well. In that, I find hope amidst her gratingly spat consonants.