Flailing her arms as she pouts exotic hostility, Christiane Amanpour roles her kohl-widened eyes with indignation as her voice resonates to pure bombast.
As if to burst with liberal self-righteousness, Amanpour’s questions, more often than not, are merely scripted vituperative diatribes. It’s no understatement to say that Amanpour’s contribution to objective journalism is analogous to Roland Freisler’s work on improving courtroom ethics.
But why have we fallen under her spell — even though millions of us know we are not just being lied to, but thoroughly insulted? It’s a question worthy of any victim of totalitarian repression. Quite simply, even as her viewers beg for more — they know she’s lying.
Indeed, the pouting, the name calling, and the partisan lying by omission might easily serve as a comic routine if the implications of such relentless disinformation weren’t so internally divisive and so geopolitically destabilizing.
To acquiesce before this con artistry by shrugging it off by saying — “we all know that CNN comes loaded with liberal bias,” is entirely missing the point: in 1961 President Eisenhower warned of the disastrous potential raised by merging the US military industrial complex with the American political establishment and warned that: “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
As McCarthyism raged, Eisenhower again understood how unchecked Russophobia in the media endangered liberty and risked global security: he duly made a diligent effort to limit McCarthy’s influence by using a clever strategy of under-the- table tactics.
This was a wise attitude that guided us through the Hungarian Crisis of 1956 and allowed us to go on to survive the Cuban Missile standoff in 1962. The system had checks and balances and hysterical personalities weren’t allowed to get the upper hand either in the Pentagon, or on the TV screens: this was an age when policy was not chartered by excitable journalists unknowingly, or otherwise, in the service of militarist bullying glibly dressed up as humanitarian interventionism. Vietnam would show the system was highly imperfect, but Eisenhower’s stance demonstrates an awareness of the dangers posed nonetheless.
Christiane Amanpour: “We in the press, by our power, can actually undermine leadership.”
What would Eisenhower have made of Christiane Amanpour’s badgering at the height of the Bosnian War for US military involvement in the Balkans Powder keg? Amanpour, much like Riefenstahl, had come to the morally repugnant belief that the very fabric of objective truth could be not just picked apart- but commercialized.
Yet ultimately, Amanpour would get her way: NATO unleashed its war machine on the Bosnian Serbs and that set a deadly precedent. With fatal consequences, Amanpour’s conditioning of western audiences with a simplistic narrative of good versus evil set this woman on a path that coincided with the rise of the neoconservatives and the ascendancy of the concept of liberal interventionism. Like the notorious Leni Riefenstahl in the 1930s, a unique set of political and cultural circumstances had fused with the flawed ambition of a young woman out to make a name for herself.
At some level, Amanpour seems to have realized her complicity in setting up the platform for endless warfare when she said, “Because if we storytellers don’t do this, the bad guys win.”
Will there ever be a time when a news story can be written without bad guys? Still, if Amanpour’s absurd logic places NATO on a permanent war footing, at least there’s job security:
“I have made my living by bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of the 20th century.”
With Russia distracted by the turmoil of the 90s, the US military-industrial establishment and the political elites must have realized that far from being an impertinent piece of international flotsam with an irritating accent, Amanpour was the kind of emotionally vulnerable ‘useful idiot’ who could be relied upon to drink their own poison and self-radicalize even as she brainwashed millions of gullible CNN viewers.
Again, like Leni Riefenstahl, Amanpour went from being a complete outsider to an intimate of the ruling elite. Both women touted a simple view of the world, merged their personas with their propaganda, and both were convinced of their own moral rectitude. Leni Riefenstahl — Christiane Amanpour, both sides of the same coin.
From Triumph of the Will to the Triumph of Hypocrisy
And that’s how it began, a young woman who doubted her identity hyped up with a mixture of naiveté, arrogance, and emotionally charged rhetoric; from then on, all that would be needed to sell a good quick war would be Amanpour in her trademark khaki jacket waving a clutch of dead baby photographs and a script, more or less penned by the most reactionary factions in the US State Department, and reliably dumbed down for mass consumption and Amanpour’s own ease.
NATO Bombs for Wedding Bells: As wretchedly biased as her work is, Amanpour’s career continuously cranked up the danger both to the integrity of global stability and American democracy: In 1998, she married James Rubin, the US State Department’s spokesman and Madeleine Albright’s right hand man. Soon thereafter, under General Wesley Clark, NATO attacked Kosovo. It was 1999 and Amanpour’s liberal rhetoric had promptly played its role in grooming mass opinion for war. For his part, General Clark would go on to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2004.
Clearly, Amanpour was not so much embedded with the frontline- but the liberal elite. Rendered invulnerable to criticism by the establishment she served, her journalistic ethics disintegrated in 1996 when she stated bluntly:
“It drives me crazy when this neutrality thing comes up. Objectivity, that great journalistic buzzword, means giving all sides a fair hearing—not treating all sides the same—particularly when all sides are not the same. When you’re neutral in a situation like Bosnia, you are an accomplice—an accomplice to genocide.”
Riefenstahl couldn’t have justified her own propaganda any better.
Of course such hypocrisy is a double-edged sword: Amanpour would indeed, by her own definition, become an accomplice to genocide in South Ossetia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.
Shaping the Narrative
Their alleged aim, Spiegel claimed, was to support Kiev with weaponry and their activities had fuelled a crisis in Ukraine that even Obama was quietly eager to sidestep. These leaked emails demonstrate that this faction required a much greater information effort in order to support the arming of Ukraine with not just non-lethal supplies like night vision goggles- but 8000 TOW-II anti-tank missiles.
This faction was, Spiegel has written, fronted by Dr. Philip Karber of the Potomac Institute think tank and Georgetown University. In one hacked email, Dr. Karber rebranded Maydan’s ultra nationalists in an outfit called DNIPRO-1, the very approach that had set Amanpour at Wolf Blitzer’s throat. Indeed, Dr. Karber along with former NATO supremo General Wesley Clark, have both called for military aid for Ukraine consistently since 2014.
Is it possible that it’s such people who are the cement between the US military and the liberal elite and that these cartels rely on Amanpour’s definition of journalism to shape the narrative not only for the public, but for the President of the United States himself? And if so, what does that tell us about one of Amanpour’s favorite themes when maligning Russia- the need for a free press as the basis of a democratic society?
Dangerous Propaganda
The transcripts of Amanpour’s broadcasts make a mockery of any semblance of journalistic objectivity- particularly with regard to Euroskeptics and the Russian Federation.
In a CNN live event aired on December 9th 2007, Amanpour began by stating in her opening sentence: “Communism has given way to capitalism on a grand scale. But Russia's newfound wealth conceals a dark truth. Its leader, Vladimir Putin has near absolute power.”
Although Amanpour’s tag line sounds like an introduction to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, in point of fact, President Putin had been in office for less time than Obama has up to 2016 and he had both stabilized the economy and society. Nevertheless, what followed was a rehash of anti-Russian propaganda that stirred in everything from slain journalists to corruption. No mention was made of President Putin’s approval ratings.
While anyone with a shred of decency would have been urging humanity to stand shoulder to shoulder with Russia, Amanpour instead referred to ‘a climate of news suppression.’ Far from showing even a grain of solidarity with Russian terror victims and their families, Amanpour invited viewers to her Facebook page to discuss ‘Putin’s pure power approach to politics.’
Amanpour ended the broadcast not with a respectful in memoriam for the 40 fatalities, but with a rock song which, Amanpour delighted in pointing out, was by an anti-Kremlin band called DDT who ‘dared to speak out’ and whose song had been supposedly rededicated to the by then long-ended Chechen War.
Amanpour dredged up ‘Pussy Riot’ on the 28th November 2013 and spoke of ‘repression’ in Russia.
On Jan 21st 2014, Amanpour hyped up security issues related to the Sochi Olympics while claiming gays in Russia were contacting her because they were supposedly ‘terrified.’
Intent on destabilizing not just Russia, but this time the entire Euro-Atlantic area, Amanpour, who had done so much to lure NATO into Bosnia and Kosovo, attempted to fan the flames of Estonian paranoia in a 2014 broadcast.
A broadcast aired on June 23rd 2014 summarily decided guilt in the MH-17 case and linked it to the downing of two Ukrainian warplanes. Later, and always eager to accuse others of her own modus operandi, Amanpour stated: “We have been watching and monitoring Russian state television, Russian media, a lot of the social media and we can see — and it's been reportedly endlessly — that there is a total parallel reality being reflected and peddled over there.”
But has it ever occurred to Amanpour that the real ‘parallel reality’ is the one she herself so dogmatically perpetuates in the West? It’s a shrill drumbeat where UKIP is labeled ‘racist,’ where 17.5 million Brexiteers can be shrugged off with contempt and where her self-serving definition of pro-mass migration ‘European values’ are an elitist sham noisily imposed by impudent charlatans like herself upon wholly unwilling populations. By contrast, the country Amanpour so relentlessly maligns is led by the democratically elected President Putin whose authority lies firmly rooted in the patriotic traditions of the Russian people.
If Amanpour’s crony journalism had developed into a detectable pattern, she knew the best defence was to bluff her way through. In an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the mercurial Amanpour claimed in 2009 that: “no one knows my biases. I am not part of the current crop of opinion journalists or commentary journalists, or feelings journalists.”
Still, for a woman who had arrived at CNN ‘on a bicycle and with only a $100 to her name,’ Amanpour had thoroughly ingratiated herself into the US liberal elite where she thrived on a symbiotic relationship based on the driving requirement to keep the US message ‘on point’ and her corresponding need for greater authority and recognition. And with the insipid liberalism came a perfect cover for her bigotry, the kind of hubristic righteousness that dulled the sense that it was really quite outrageous that she had only ever rarely been caught out as a flagrant fraud.
Unbelievably, from playing on her ethnicity to win premature journalistic credibility on the cheap, Amanpour had morphed a personal need for political correctness into high-powered liberal politics: it was an alchemy she doused herself in and it would deliver what all bullies crave: unassailable authority.
The problem is that bullies inevitably require targets and Amanpour’s have included Glenn Beck, Nigel Farage, Wolf Blitzer, Donald Trump, Annisa Nouai and, more importantly- the thousands of dead and maimed her reporting has variously instigated, or, when it suits US geostrategy- ignored.
On his radio show, the Blaze, Glenn Beck stated in 2013: “Christiane Amanpour is the greatest fraud I have ever met.” Beck went on to argue passionately that: “The kind of help you (Amanpour) deliver leads people to the slaughterhouse. See Libya. See Syria. See Tunisia. See Egypt.”
After disgracefully pulling in the daughter of Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, into her antics- the veteran diplomat responded in writing by telling Amanpour the bitter truth about her work.
But Amanpour’s personal attacks on Russia-related issues have included the bizarre; at the end of a discussion on Ukraine in 2014, Wolf Blitzer innocently quoted Vitaly Churkin on the well-documented role of fascists and anti-Semites in stoking the Ukraine crisis. Amanpour, whose mantra throughout the Brexit campaign would be to accuse all and sundry of ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ leapt like an attack dog to the defence of Ukraine’s pro-EU putschists.
What follows is an exchange that is both ugly and disturbing as Amanpour turns on a colleague in a frantic effort to whitewash Maydan’s blood-spattered Nazi militias.
Normalizing Hell-Amanpour Turns 360 from Srebrenica
Georgia’s savage assault on South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali in August 2008, saw Amanpour callously playing down mass civilian casualties. Her stance on Georgian aggression was the polar opposite of that which she had taken in both Bosnia and Kosovo and directly correlated with that of the US State Department and NATO’s geopolitical interests.
Amanpour set the trend for the Western media, who would venture into the ruins of Tskhinvali only in a vain attempt to debunk the real death toll among Russian peacekeepers and civilians.
Amanpour openly linked her reporting on the Georgian War to a CNN propaganda portfolio produced a year earlier in 2007 called ‘Czar Putin.’ Her role was to ensure that even when defending Russian citizens from barbarity, viewers would remain entirely mistrustful of the Kremlin’s claims. It was also necessary to expunge the depths of Sakhashvili’s war crimes due to Georgia’s pivot towards NATO, American military aid to Tbilisi, and the need to eclipse any suggestion that the West’s rose-scented incursion into the post-Soviet sphere had emboldened the Georgians to the point where they were ready to commit mass murder.
And yet, with every tragedy that has ever struck Russia, be it from religious extremists, or fascists spawned by colored revolution- Amanpour has only ever used the slaughter of innocents as an opportunity to undermine the cohesion of the Russian state. Be crystal clear, her agenda is as vile as it is dangerous.
Inevitably Manichean in her simplistic thinking, Amanpour absolutely needs RT in her relativistic game of smoke and mirrors. It’s this miasma of motivations that explain how Amanpour’s mask slipped in 2014 as she fell into the trap she herself had set for RT’s Anissa Naouai.
Again, like any schoolyard bully, Amanpour tried to belittle her opponent- calling Ms. Naouai ‘babe,’ lamenting that she had ‘expected an adult discussion’ and that she would soon allow Ms. Naouai ‘to go back to her work.’ It was the language of a house servant turned madam.
Hinting at her defining identity crisis, Amanpour persisted in addressing Anissa Naouai as if she were speaking to a Russian- despite being repeatedly put right on the fact that the RT anchor was an American citizen.
The entire incident exemplified how quickly Amanpour was capable of descending into embarrassingly chaotic reactions when challenged- which admittedly, was not a problem she had faced very often.
While Amanpour is allowed to range unchecked against voiceless Brexiteers and permitted to slanderously claim that the GOP wants to ‘wage war on Muslims,’ Anissa Naouai wasn’t playing by the liberal elite’s rules of political correctness when she challenged everything- including Amanpour’s all too obvious moral instigation of NATO’s repeated bombing of the former Yugoslavia.
As the RT anchor stood her ground, Amanpour unraveled and as her voice tensed she asked, not unlike the mentally unstable Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, the two eerily repeated questions of- “Are you talking to me?” While the EU-NATO Axis is becoming increasingly unhinged, unelected factions are working on the synoptic pathways that tether the US liberal cartels to both the US military industrial complex and the EU.
Should the EU-NATO Axis stagger eastwards in one final lunge, or should its fascist proxies in the post-Soviet sphere march again under the banner of genocide, Amanpour is certain to be on hand with her simple sound bites, partisan diatribes, and fact free arguments. Once again, she will get the story either way.
The time has come however for American and British citizens- most of whom Amanpour resolutely despises as ‘scary totalitarian Christians’ and anti-EU ‘xenophobes’- to ask themselves if having this excitable, self hating narcissist waving her hands about on the front lines of some frozen conflict in Russia’s backyard is one globalist insult too many.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
