Why we're in the fight of our lives
By Christiane Amanpour Posted Fri, Dec 1 2000
The following is an edited excerpt from Christiane Amanpour’s speech at the 2000 Radio-Television News Directors Association’s Convention:
Seventeen years ago, I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, my bicycle and about US$100. Indeed, I came from one of the best local stations that took me in right after college and sort of had pity on me and gave me a job. And they encouraged me to try CNN because they knew somebody who worked there.
Anyway, I got down there, and it was really exciting. We were pioneers, we were proud to be a band of young college graduates thinking we’d get some practical experience on the job and hoping that experience would be a stepping stone to the big leagues.
Because I am foreign, I was assigned to the foreign desk. I kid you not — it’s true. I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be a foreign correspondent.
But, with all my youthful exuberance and highfalutin dreams, nothing really prepared me for the intensity of the work that I took on and that I have done over the past 10 years with my wonderful teams of camera people and editors and sound people and field producers. But when I started out, I really was an adventurer. I thought that CNN would be my ticket to see the world and (that I would) be at the center of history — on someone else’s dime!
I have spent the past 10 years in just about every war zone there was. I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events at the end of the 20th century. I am so identified over the world, because CNN is seen all over the world, that I’m so identified with war and disaster these days that wherever I go, people say jokingly, or maybe not so jokingly, that they shudder when they see me: Oh, my god! Amanpour is coming. Is something bad going to happen 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. And I calculated that I have spent more time at the front than most military units. I have lost many friends, and I’ve seen many, many more wounded by snipers, by mortar shells, by land mines and by the crazed Kalashnikov-wielding druggies at checkpoints. It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past 10 years living in a state of repressed fear. I rarely talk about this because frankly it is impossible to talk about, but I ask you in this room tonight whether you know what it must be like to spend all your working life scared. Scared of being shot, of being kidnapped, of being raped by some lunatic who may not want your story or who blames you for bringing NATO bombs down around him. We manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll.
And so there’s the horror of what we see. In Rwanda, piles of bodies that were lifted by bulldozers after a genocide and simply dumped into mass graves. I saw the toughest of soldiers, who had to supervise this, crying. 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, the walking skeletons that heralded those terrible famines. I remember once doing a live shot from a so-called famine camp in Ethiopia, and in Somalia as well. I was showing a man and telling his story and explaining how ill he was, and it was a live cast, and all of a sudden, I realized that he was dying. And I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know how to break that moment, how to get the camera away, what to do that would not sully what was happening in real life. And then there’s always the crying and the weeping that we hear — children, women, even men. These images and sounds are always with me.
I have often wondered why I do it, why we do it. After a few seconds, the answer used to come easily — because it’s worth it, 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 people will win. We do it because we’re committed, because we’re believers. And one thing that I always believed and that I knew for certain was that I could never have sustained a personal relationship while I worked this hard, or while I was that driven this intensely by the story.
But a strange thing has happened, something I never expected. Sadly, marriage and motherhood have coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it and dreamt that it would always be. I am no longer sure when I go out there and do my job that 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 of them assigned like myself to some of the world’s royal bad places. They would go through hell to do their pieces, only to find them frequently killed back in New York because of some fascinating new twist on “killer Twinkies” or Fergie getting fatter. I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories or not to run stories that people have risked their lives to get.
My son was barely 2 months old when two of my best friends and colleagues from The Associated Press and Reuters were murdered in an ambush in Sierra Leone. I was devastated, and I was really angry. They were killed telling a very important story, but I wonder if anyone knows where Sierra Leone is. If not, why not? How many stations, how many networks aired their footage?
It made me think long and hard about what we do, and I asked myself why I still do it. Do I have anything else to prove? Am I a war junkie? Why do any of us do this? There are, of course, a lot of reasons. Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for. I am not alone in feeling really depressed about the state of news today. A veteran BBC reporter, and a friend of mine, with supreme British understatement, said, “News is heading down rather a curious corridor.”
A longtime and highly awarded colleague of mine has gotten out of the business altogether. He’s gone into politics and says he thinks news and journalism died in the ’90s. Now, I don’t share that much pessimism, but something has to change. We, I believe, are in the fight of our lives to save this profession that we love. I believe we can do it. We can win this battle.
I am proud of the work Western journalists did in exposing genocide and mass murder around the world and spurring action, sometimes belatedly, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in East Timor. They brought the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia to light and got those people help and changed things. Often our words and our pictures are their only opening to the world. And there is so much fantastic work being produced in the United States that exposes corruption and injustice, that gets things done and gets things changed.
But think how much more of a contribution we could make to this great society if we weren’t so dependent on what I call those hocus-focus-pocus awful groups who tell us what people are not interested in. They tell us that Americans don’t care about serious news, Americans don’t care about this presidential election, Americans don’t care about foreign news, Americans don’t care about anything except contemplating their own navels. That’s what they tell us.
It is true that the Cold War has ended and that our big bosses think that relieves them of the obligation to cover the world. What’s happened is that we seem to have given in and encouraged a trend of self-obsession. But to be self-obsessed is simply not OK for the most important country in the world, the United States, which affects every other country in the world.
H.L. Mencken once said that no one would ever go broke underestimating the American people, but that’s not true. It’s, in fact, just the opposite. What Americans don’t care much about is the piffle that 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’re too stupid to know the difference. And that’s why, I think, they are voting with their off switch, which means that not only are we not giving them quality because we think it costs too much and they don’t want it, but pandering to what we think they want also is simply bad business. And not only that, we alienate our core constituency, too.
I recently came across the following quote from the great Martha Gelhorn, who was the wife of Ernest Hemingway. She was also a great war correspondent, and she said, “That in all my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and that I 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,” she said as she was about to retire. “I belong to a global fellowship of men and women who are 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.”
I still have many years left in me, if I still have a job, 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 that’s why I still do it. And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place. And I really believe good journalism is good business.