There’s a natural desire to see some people as larger-than-life icons. News agencies routinely play into that, extolling certain high-profile journalists as symbols of all that is good and true.
For many years, that’s been the case with Christiane Amanpour, my former colleague at CNN. Now that she has announced a plan to depart from both CNN and PBS, worshipful reporting by the mainstream media has begun (I don’t link to this drivel, but it’s plentiful). The coverage ignores her record of promoting and platforming propaganda.
Presenting journalists in a hagiographic way is particularly harmful to society. Seeing entertainment figures as icons doesn’t necessarily hurt people. But telling the public to put blind trust in certain individuals as truth-tellers is dangerous.
Here are just some of Christiane’s recent journalistic disasters, which I’ve covered:
Lying about global intelligence on Iran (Episode 62)
Platforming anti-Israel propagandists who masquerade as “documentarians” (Episode 40)
Praising Qatar’s propaganda giant Al Jazeera as a source of “truth” (Episode 11)
Late last year, amazingly, she apologized for an outrageous falsehood about Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
Does this mean ignoring her good work? No. But if CNN, PBS, and other news agencies were designed to provide only the truth, these disasters wouldn’t have taken place. And in covering her departure, the media should present her real record — good, bad, and ugly. (Here, I focus on what the media refuses to acknowledge.)
In a recent interview with the political podcast Face Forward, I explained how TV news went awry by seeking to create “stars.” Journalism should be structured entirely around the simple equation: Truth = Facts + Context. Instead, networks made a desire for on-camera personalities their chief goal. It has never succeeded, and news agencies are losing audiences.
But inside news agencies, a handful of personalities collect massive, multi-million dollar paychecks every year, while most other employees barely get by. These figures are also given societal megaphones to spread messages far and wide in interviews with other news outlets and on social media.
They could use all that power to fight for truth. Instead, they generally focus on maintaining their own “brands” to keep the cash rolling in and the power firmly in place. It’s addictive.
Meanwhile, by leaving CNN just weeks after Skydance brought CNN and CBS under the same corporate roof, Amanpour fuels the media's lazy obsession with framing network shifts as purely partisan. Commentators are eager to claim these legacy brands are bowing to political pressure and supporting Trump. Reality disproves this. But newsrooms ignore their own systemic decay.
America deserves better. We need a revolution in the news world. A system that exists to cut through all the noise and spin, and tells you about concrete reality. Join me in showing the media that They Stand Corrected.
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She’s disgusting