Top Ten most Left-Biased American Journalists – #8: Christiane Amanpour CNN
July 16, 2010 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, CNN, Iran, Journalism, Media, Media Bias, Warner Todd Huston | 4 Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
As we continue with America’s most left-biased, working journalist list we feature a journo that takes herself quite seriously as a non-opinion styled journalist. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour really does think that no one can tell that she is a true-blue left-winger. Sadly, there is that all too human penchant of fooling oneself as much as one tries to fool others with this one. But that doesn’t stop her from making the claim.
In 2008, for instance, Amanpour said of herself, “I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality.”
Nice story, that. Reality, though, seems to diverge a bit from Amanopour’s self-serving assessment.
Let’s take Amanpour’s recent altercation with Marc Thiessen for example.
During a recent appearance on her show, the former Bush speech writer took Amanpour to task for saying that the waterboarding tortures perpetrated by Cambodia’s genocidal communist organization Khmer Rouge was exactly the same sort used by the Bush administration on terror suspects.
Here is how Amanpour characterized the waterboarding practices during her filmed visit to the Khmer Rouge torture camps.
I stared blankly at another of Vann Nath’s paintings. This time, a prisoner is submerged in a life-size box of water, handcuffed to the side so he cannot escape or raise his head to breathe, his interrogators arrayed him, demanding information. I asked Vann Nath whether he had heard this was once used on America’s terror suspects. He nodded his head, ‘It’s not right.
As Thiessen points out, this is a blatant untruth. The U.S. never used this sort of actual torture on terror suspects. The waterboarding used by U.S. authorities does not resemble the evil work of the Khmer Rouge in any way. But as far as this “unbiased” reporter is concerned, the U.S. is no different than the murderous Khmer Rouge. But Amanpour was quite happy to spread the disinformation about America’s efforts in the war against terror, anyway. It was in her special “un-biased” way, of course.
Amanpour is also yet another Old Media apologist for the Obammessiah. Last December when everyone was making fun of The One for being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize quite despite his complete lack of works to qualify for such an award, Amanpour rushed to the fore to criticise those attacking Obama over the award.
Amanpour was incensed that people were scoffing at Obama’s undeserved prize. “You know what? Can I just say, I think it’s overdone, this pushing back against his award,” the CNN host said. “He’s obviously done something very significant, and that is, after eight years in which the United States was really held in contempt around the world, the United States has now had a new relationship with the rest of the world. This is what the Nobel Committee has rewarded and has accepted. This is what the polls around the world are showing.”
What “significant” work Obama had done to win a peace prize was never really delineated by the CNN host. Maybe she felt that just winning election was enough? If so, she reveals a complete lack of understanding about what a peace prize should be awarded for. Maybe something like fostering peace?
But the worst bias that the Iranian-born Amanpour exhibits is her penchant to come to the aid of Muslims, to denigrate Israel, and to equate Christianity as equal to Islam in perpetrating evil.
In 2008, for instance, Amanpour claimed that the China/Tibet situation was exactly the same as that of Israel and the Palestinians. No one with even a cursory understanding of the two situations could agree with her, however.
Tibet was always a separate, sovereign nation that China moved to conquer in order to eliminate the Tibetan culture. On the other hand there never was any such nation as “Palestine” when Israel was formed by a 1948 United Nations decree. And the Israel/Palestinian situation was only created after Israel was attacked by an alliance of Arab nations in the 1967 Six Day War not by overt Israeli actions.
Even as far back as 2007, Amanpour was seen doing her best to conflate what she felt was the evils of Christianity to the actual evils of Islam presenting them as if they were the same.
During CNN’s special “God’s Warriors,” Amanpour says, “As I report around the world, people often ask me about the rise of religious influence on political power within the United States, but in fact this is true worldwide.” Here Amanpour conflates the way Christians interact with their governments world-wide to the way Muslims do in theirs. It’s as if Amanpour thinks there is no difference between jhadi governments infused with Muslim Sharia laws and western Christians participating in their democratic institutions.
Still, after years of slighting Israel, western Christianity, the U.S. government, and anything else that stands in her ideological way, Amanpour insists that no one knows her political biases. In a 2009 interview with Lesley Stahl, Amanpour said, “I ask people just to look at my body of work. And nobody knows my biases. Do they think I’m against? Do they think I’m for? They don’t know my biases.”
Well, we are looking and from what we can see her biases are far from hidden. But we aren’t the only ones. In March, TV critic Tom Shales worried that Amanpour’s often complained about anti-Israeli bias made her a bad candidate for ABC’s This Week Sunday TV show.
In summation, one wonders just how extreme Christiane Amanpour could get? She nearly wears her bias on her sleeve as it is. One shudders to think what would happen if this “non-ideological” journalist would decide to let her hair down and really let her bias-flag fly? Yep, when it rains it Amanpours.
Please check back tomorrow for journalist number seven, won’t you?
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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