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Gifts of Speech - Christiane Amanpour

Radio-Television News Director's Association
Keynote Speech at the
2000 Murrow Awards Ceremony
by Christiane Amanpour
British Journalist

Keynote Speech at the Edward R. Murrow Awards Ceremony, Minneapolis: September 13, 2000

Thank you very much.

When I was thinking was about, you know, what I'd say when I came here it occurred to me that it's exactly 17 years to this very day that I walked into CNN, and I wonder whether my bosses remember that day. They probably actually think that it's seventeen hundred years, because I've aged them, I've beaten up on them for all these years and tonight will be no different.

But 17 years ago, I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, with my bicycle, and with about 100 dollars. Indeed I came from one of the best local stations who 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. And basically said, "You know, this is a great opportunity for somebody like yourself who's foreign, who has a foreign accent. We hear foreign accents on CNN. It's crazy, it's wild, who knows, maybe they'll take you because you certainly don't fit in, in the American spectrum of news.

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 steppingstone to the big leagues.

Little did we know then that CNN would become the big league

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.

And of course I started (we're talking) 17 years ago, when the trench-coated foreign correspondent was the job to strive for. When reputations in news could be made with a couple of well-reported foreign stories.

I am sorry to say that my first boss was a woman. You'd think this would have helped me, but it didn't, if I had thought I would get a sympathetic hearing from her, some female solidarity, I didn't, I was sorely mistaken. She hated me and my ambition. She made fun of me, she said, "You'll never make it at CNN; you've got to go somewhere else and start." In any event that was all character-building stuff.

And I worked my way up through every level. I was a writer, I was a producer, I was a field producer, I was a reporter and I am a reporter. I managed to convert a few people in management, a few believers, and here I am.

We thrived as I said on the pioneer spirit of CNN. We adored being the little network that could. It was called Chicken Noodle News, we thought that was cute, that was funny, we loved that fact. We loved the fact that we were mocked as we kicked ass all over the world. We were thrilled. We were thrilled and we were privileged to be part of a revolution, because make no mistake about it, Ted Turner changed the world with CNN. Not only did he create 24-hour news, and all that that has meant, but he truly created the global village. And as corny as that sounds, nothing has been the same since.

But, with all my youthful exuberance and high-faluting 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; our "band" has done unbelievable stuff over the last 10 years. But when I started out I really was an adventurer. I thought that CNN would be my ticket to see the world, and be at the center of history--on someone else's dime.!!!!!

Well, it was, and I did, but soon the reality of the business that I had chosen sank in.

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was. I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, 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 normal military units.

I have lost many friends and I've seen many, many more wounded, by snipers, by mortar shells, by landmines and by the crazed Kalashnikov-wielding druggies at checkpoints. It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past ten years living in a state of repressed fear.

You heard in the NBC documentary what those soldiers felt like. We all think of them as brave and courageous, but it's fear that is the underlying emotion.

I really talk, 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 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 them. We manage the fear, I manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll, the strain does. And so there's the horror of what we see. In Rwanda, piles of bodies that are 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 and signaled those terrible famines.

I remember once doing a live shot from a so-called famine camp in Ethiopia--and actually in Somalia as well. I was showing a man and telling his story and explaining how ill he was, and it was a live camera 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. And these images and these sounds are always with me.

And 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.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.

That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son now. I've also learned to watch my words or be forced to eat them.

Before my son was born I used to joke about looking for bullet-proof Snugglies and Kevlar diapers. I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent. But now, like every working mother, when I think of my son, and having to leave him, and I imagine him fixing those large innocent eyes on me and asking me, "Mummy, why are you going to those terrible places? What if they kill you?" I wince.

I know that I want to say, that it's because I have to, because it matters, because Mummy's going to tell the world about the bad guys and perhaps do a little good.

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 I dreamt that it would always be. I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job 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 frequently find them killed back in New York, because of some fascinating new twist on "killer Twinkies" or Fergie getting fatter, or something. I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

My son was barely two months old when as you heard from Robert [Garcia, RTNDA chairman] 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, does anyone know 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 do I still do it? Do I have anything else to prove? Am I a war junkie? Why do any of us do this? And 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, this is the business that we have chosen. And I said already, if we the storytellers give up, then the bad guys certainly will win. 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 long-time, and highly awarded colleague of mine has gotten out of the business altogether, gone into politics, saying that he thinks news and journalism died in the nineties. 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 which we love. I believe we can do it, and I believe we can win this battle.

All of us on this room share this ludicrous state of affairs. So aware am I of it that recently I carefully clipped an article, it was a few months ago from the New York Times and I just about put it under my pillow and slept with it. WBBM television in Chicago is going back to basic journalism! That was the article. And a rare example of dog bites man actually being news!!!! And I have read of news directors in Florida and elsewhere around this country trying the same thing.

And I don't dare ask how this radical experiment is doing in the ratings, because all my fingers and toes are crossed.

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, national television, international television, is the critical force. What we do and say and show really matters. And as we have seen in some of the fantastic work that was shown here tonight, it has an effect on our local communities, on our states, on our country, and on the state of the world.

And yet, the powers that be, the moneymen, have decided to eviscerate us. It actually costs a little bit of money to produce good journalism, to travel, to investigate, to put compelling viewing on screen, and to give people a reason to watch us.

But God forbid money should be spent on our news operations, pursuing quality. For the most part, as we've seen, it's just a lot of demeaning, irrelevant, super-hyped sensationalism. And then we wonder why people are tuning out in droves, and I don't think it's just the new competition, which is obviously part of it, it's the drivel we spew into their living rooms.

The great Vietnam-era journalist and author of the book "The Powers That Be," David Halberstam, has recently written in Brill's Content, that journalism today is basically tailored to the shareholders, that the owners give off a feeling of real passion for their stock.

Our parent companies and corporations are raking in the profits, but let me throw down this challenge: what is the point of having all this money and this fancy new technology and being able to go anywhere and broadcast everywhere, if we are simply going to drive ourselves and our news operations into the ground? It really makes you wonder about mega-mergers. 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. We live as Bertie Ahern the Irish Prime Minister said at last week's UN summit in New York. "We live in a society after all, not in a marketplace. News is part of our communal experience. It's a public service". Surely a news corporation should be the crown jewel, the news operation should be the crown jewel of any corporation, the thing that makes a corporation feel good about itself. Let us make you feel proud. Let us make you feel good about yourselves. Let us even bolster your credibility. Don't cut our costs. Give us more money so that we can produce real quality, so that we can produce work that will reverberate in all the right places, for all the right reasons.

We all love "Millionaire." I love "Millionaire." Make your money off that. Make your super-dollars somewhere else. Leave us alone, with only good competitive journalism as our benchmark. Give us a break, you advertisers. I know I don't need to remind you all that quality programs that make money too. There's 60 Minutes, there's Nightline, and there are many others.

No matter what the hocus-pocus focus groups tell you, time has proven that all the gimmicks and all the cheap journalism can only carry us so far.

You can ask questions in any way you like to get the question, or the answer, that you want. So that when you take a focus group and you say to them, "Well, would you rather hear about some distant, irrelevant, ridiculous place on the other side of the world or about, you know, medical, health at home?" Well obviously they're gonna say medical health at home. I would. But if you ask, "If we told you a story about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa or the little children starving in Ethiopia, or whatever, if we told you those issues and we made them compelling, would you listen?" I bet you they'd say yes. This is a country full of compassionate people, full of people who like to care. And I know from the reaction I get from my stories, that people are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

Remember the movie "Field of Dreams" when the voice said, "Build it and they will come." Well somehow that dumb statement has always stuck in my mind. And I always say, "If you tell a compelling story, they will watch."

And lest you think these are woolly-headed musings of a foreign correspondent, we're not dinosaurs, we the people, we are the frontier. The techno wizards have mastered the hardware, but we're the software. And that will never change.

Today's buzzwords are "content" and "platforms." Well, we produce the content for all your different platforms, and that won't change. Newsprint, humble newsprint, the New York Times, still rules the world. Someone else might have said once, "It's the content, Stupid."

Our industry has invested so much money in technology that perhaps it's time to invest in talent, in people. You wouldn't believe how many people in newsrooms that I know have a hard time even recognizing news anymore. It's hard when I have a younger generation of college graduates who come up and they ask about the old news stories and they really want to do it because they know that journalism is worthy and good and something, you know, great to do. But the questions I get asked by a lot of them are really frightening.

I am personally thrilled though by the changes at CNN, which no doubt you have all read about. because it means we are responding to the times. And I'm sure we will regain our unique niche, and stop trying to be all things to all people, and find our way again into doing what we do best, and, thank you, what we alone can do, and that is gather the news first, tell the news, and send it out the farthest around the world.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad. They accuse us, particularly television journalists, of hyping everything for ratings. Again, in this months' Brill's Content, which you can see I've read cover to cover for this speech, a group of people said-and this is really sad-they might be able to learn something about issues if they don't watch the news. Ouch, that's scary! They'll get their information somewhere else, because they are not getting it from us, they think.

But I work all over the world, where people really see journalists as serious players. They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be. And I think that you all would be thrilled, and energized, and electrified, if you could just see what TV and newspapers are doing out there.

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Russia's new president Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on silencing the voice of the independent media, how powerful he thinks they are, unless they toe his line. When he failed the test of leadership and lied to his own people about the sinking of the Kursk submarine, it was Russian journalists who exposed the Kremlin's double talk and KGB-style propaganda, Russian journalists who revealed there were in fact no survivors, when the Kremlin was telling us there were, that in fact there was nobody banging on the hull, that Russian ships were in fact not supplying the Kursk with oxygen, as the Kremlin and other officials were saying that they were.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press. And so powerful in fact that now the hard-line mullahs have realized it and they've cracked down, and they've closed down the outspoken new journalists. But every time they close one down, somebody else opens up, another newspaper.

I am proud of the work western journalists did in exposing genocide and mass murder around the world, and spurring action, sometimes belatedly, nonetheless spurring action, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in East Timor, of bringing the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia to light, and getting those people help and changing things. Often our words and our pictures are their only opening to the world. And as we have seen tonight there is so much fantastic work being produced in the United States that exposes corruption and injustice, and that gets things done and gets things changed. As well as so much wonderful feature work as well--that great story about the septuagenarian with his golf swing. I mean there is so much good stuff.

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 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 o.k. 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 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 and all the rest of it, but pandering to what we think they want also is simply bad business. And not only that, we alienate our core constituency too.

For instance, why are we terrorizing this country, leading with murder and mayhem, when crime is actually on the decline, as somebody, as somebody mentioned?

Why have we given George W. Bush such an easy ride when-until now, that is-when actually his qualifications are questionable?

The way the mass media treats the democratic process and the truly poisonous relationship between government and the press right now must something to do why Americans are so alienated from it. I think that's bad for the greatest country in the world, which seeks to project her values around the world.

We in the press, by our power, can actually undermine leadership. And of course our politicians need to be a bit a little more convinced of themselves and stop doing this, but let me give you some chilling examples.

When we were all in Somalia, covering the famine a few years ago, you remember that there was a U.S. raid trying to capture one of the warlords there, Ideed, and one of the U.S. soldiers was killed. Well more than one, but one was graphically shown being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. And that image, and I can tell you from experience, has haunted U.S. foreign policy since that day. It's the reason why there wasn't intervention earlier in Bosnia when we were showing that a genocide was happening there. It's the reason why there was no intervention at all in Rwanda when a million people were killed in three months. It's the reason why now the war criminals are not being picked up in Bosnia. Because the leaders are afraid of those kind of pictures, because actually leadership can be painful, actually sending in an operation in to do something can have some casualties, but because that image that we played over and over and over and over again forced a new president, one who is not experienced in foreign policy, to pull out of Somalia, it has had a traumatic effect ever since.

India and Pakistan, nuclear-tipped countries fighting over Kashmir. A Pakistani journalist friend of mine was telling me the last time they almost came to blows over Kashmir, Pakistan was watching the television reports in India and they were really playing to people's nationalism, playing to people's fear. And this Pakistani journalist I know asked his Indian colleagues in the print press, why this was happening and don't you realize the stakes here? And they said, "It's TV, it's our TV colleagues that drove us, every time they showed a body bag coming back from Kashmir, everybody got all hysterical. And so this was driving and this was really dangerous when you're talking about two countries with their fingers on nuclear buttons.

I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way. And I hope that the way I tell my stories reflects that.

To me it seems simple. If we have no respect for our viewers, then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do? And I think it's time the cost-cutters, the money-managers and the advertisers, as I said, gave us room to operate in a way that's meaningful, otherwise we will soon be folding our tents, and slinking off into the sunset. No new media vehicle has ever killed off another one. It's the age of interactive, but newspapers, radio, television, they're all still here to stay.

I picked up a prop on my way over-The Economist--and it says, "What the Internet Cannot Do," and inside, you know, and here I am thinking the Internet frankly has taken over, that part of the problem lies in delivery, as all of you will know. I didn't know this. The Internet is pretty good at delivering data, real-time, written information, but apparently not video, which makes up the biggest slice of our output. And it's because of broadband and etc. and etc. The key figure here is that at the end of 1999 according to "Broadband Intelligence," an industry newsletter, only 1.5 million American households, that's 1.5 percent of the country, had broadband internet connections. So I just assume and calculate I hope I am right, that television is still it. But we the people who run it, though, are in danger of doing what no other technology has been able to do, and that is driving ourselves into extinction by being thoroughly and totally irrelevant. And only we can stop it.

I recently came across the following quote from the great Martha Gelhorn, who was the wife of Ernest Hemmingway (although she hated that being the first letter of introduction) she was also a great, great, 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," she said.

"My responsibility was the effort. 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. Good for you. Never give up," she said as she was about to retire.

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.