In the wake of her recent world and US exclusive interviews with embattled world leaders during the Middle East revolutions, Christiane Amanpour reaffirmed her reputation as probably the world’s greatest reporter alive. First she landed an unplanned, half-hour world exclusive with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 3rd February 2011 smack in the middle of the turmoil: 9 days after the demonstrations began and 8 days before Mubarak resigned. Too bad it was not captured on video camera though.
Digital Journal records that:
In what could only be called a media coup de grace, ABC reporter Christiane Amanpour managed to land a world exclusive interview with Hosni Mubarak, the embattled Egyptian president, beating out CNN’s Anderson Cooper and others to the finish line. The news team had apparently only been granted an interview with the newly appointed Vice-President Omar Suleiman at the presidential palace, some eight miles from Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the protests. On the ABC News website, Amanpour writes that, to get the presidential palace, her team had to take “a route that ran through a neighborhood where there were pro-Mubarak supporters in the streets”. She describes being surrounded by an angry mob and after an hour / so of negotiating and presenting the official invitation to the interview. They were eventually let through and upon arriving at the palace and waiting for the opportunity to meet the vice-president, Amanpour, as gutsy as ever, inquired into the possibility of speaking to Mubarak. Within minutes, she claims, she was whisked into a reception room and had her chance with the man at the center of the storm, whose every move and word is being monitored by the eyes of the world. Mubarak had not appeared in public / spoken with foreign correspondents since the outbreak of the crisis.
Even Amanpour, with her years of experience, described the meeting as an “extraordinary experience”. She managed to get the monumental Mubarak interview while her previous employer, the arguably more established news channel CNN failed to speak to the Egyptian president.
Then, on 28th February 2011, she managed a US exclusive interview with Muammar Gaddafi and his sons Saif al-Islam and Al-Saadi al-Gaddafi, 11 days after the revolt started. She participated in the face to face Gaddafi interview with the BBC (represented by its Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen) and the Sunday Times of London which lasted more than an hour.
I just love how she introduced herself to the Libyan dictator. And to Mr Bowen: should I ever meet Gaddafi in person, I now know how to greet him.
A text excerpt of that interview.
An insight into what makes her tick was provided in her comment to her peers at a national convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association:
Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.
Newsroom Magazine, in June 2009, listed her among the greatest broadcast journalist who ever lived, and even hinted that she’s the best of them all:
Men like John Chancellor, Roger Mudd, Bernard Shaw — and pioneering women including Nancy Dickerson, Pauline Frederick and Marya McLaughlin. But Amanpour brings something more to her employers and her profession for she is not cowed by power and money, nor fearful, nor driven by self-interest.
And I’m sure she’s a classy lady who’s into the finer things in life like interior plantation shutters for her house…
A bit about the people mentioned above:
John Chancellor (1927 – 1996), American, anchor of NBC Nightly News 1970 – 1982.
Roger Mudd (b. 1928), American, primary anchor for The History Channel. During a CBS interview with Senator Edward M Kennedy on 4th November 1979, which was broadcast 3 days before he officially announced that he was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination, Mudd asked a question which left the senator gobsmacked: “Senator, why do you want to be president?” Kennedy stammered in a way that has been described as “incoherent, repetitive, vague and unprepared,” so much so that it cast huge doubts on his real reasons in wanting to run for US presidency, and subsequently a sharp decline in his initially promising poll figures. In the end, Carter won 50-38. The term “Roger Mudd moment” has been used by some to mean “a self-inflicted disastrous encounter with the press by a presidential candidate.”
Bernard Shaw (born 1940), American, anchor of CNN 1980 – 2001. During the 1988 US Presidential election debate, which he was moderating, knowing that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis opposed the death penalty, Shaw bluntly asked Dukakis if he would “support an irrevocable death penalty for a man who hypothetically raped and murdered Dukakis’s wife”. Then, while reporting on the 1991 Gulf War from the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, he reported cruise missiles flying past his window while sheltering under a desk. He also unforgettably remarked about what it was like in Baghdad: “clearly I’ve never been there, but this feels like we’re in the center of hell.”
Pauline Frederick (1906-90), American, first woman journalist to moderate a presidential candidates’ debate 1976.
Nancy Dickerson (1927 – 1997), American, the first CBS female correspondent (in 1960). She was the first woman on the floor of a political convention.
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