Christiane Amanpour

Paul White Awards Ceremony

Christiane Amanpour' gives her acceptance speech at RTNDA@NAB after receiving the Paul White Award on April 16, 2007, in Las Vegas. Christiane Amanpour is CNN's chief international correspondent.

Jim Walton, president of CNN International, introduced Amanpour:
Good evening. Tough day (because of the Virginia Tech shootings).

Often times when I get before a group like this, I start with a funny story. I've known Christiane since the very early-80s. And I have a lot of funny stories about her. But I don't feel any of them are appropriate today. I'm sure we all, as Barbara said, extend our condolences to the families impacted by the shooting today.

But I am very pleased to help recognize the professional accomplishments of an extraordinary journalist. I know how proud Christiane is to receive the Paul White Award, proud of the company in which it places her, proud of the work it acknowledges, and proud to accept it from people she admires and respects. That said, it's a bit soon to honor her for lifetime achievement; she's too young. Her work has never been better. There has never been a greater need in the world for the kind of journalism that is her signature. To salute her for a life's work might mean there was an end in sight, and that's something I'm not prepared to contemplate. But you don't have to tell that to your agent, Christiane. So with all respect to Mr. White and past and future recipients of the honor that bears his name, let's call this year's Paul White Award, "recognition for professional work in progress."

Let's pay due respect to the quality and character that comes with choosing to be where a story is, wherever that may happen to be, for bearing witness, and for telling the truth. Let's pay due respect to one of our own who is influential and knows it, and knows how to use it to honor the facts and her subjects in our profession. Let's pay due respect to a brand of boots-on-the-ground, no-nonsense, sometimes-tough-to-look-at -- but always-worth-seeing -- reporting that recalls the great ones who she reveres, and in whose elite fraternity she has earned her place. Let's pay due respect to 24 years, to countless stories, to remarkable people, to success and disappointment, ideals and determination, passion and common sense, and common hard work. And to all the years and stories and people and extraordinary journalism yet to come from this extraordinary journalist.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 2007 Paul White Award recipient, Christiane Amanpour.

Amanpour's Acceptance Speech:
Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much Jim, and thank you Barbara. And thank you all. As Jim and Barbara have said, it is a bit awkward, and uncomfortable, to be standing here on a day of such monumental tragedy in another part of the United States. But while we pay tribute to and commemorate and sympathize with those who have lost today, I also think it is an amazing moment where the power of television and the power of what we do at our best can be shown to work and can come to light.

And so ladies and gentlemen of RTNDA, all my colleagues, co-workers and distinguished others assembled here today, thank you for this honor, for the Paul White Award.

I confess, as Jim alluded, to a slight smidgen of grumpiness when I was told I'd be getting a lifetime achievement award. It carries too many implications. But just as I was wrestling with that, I read that Patti Smith, a similar such wrestler who has also just been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, finally took her husband's advice, which was to accept gracefully in his name, and with gratitude.

And so I too accept this lifetime award with my gratitude and grace, in the name of my husband and son, in the name of all the special people that I have known that I have worked with throughout my long apprenticeship, from the bottom rung of CNN 23 and a half years ago to this platform, all of the people who taught me everything that I know. I accept in the name of CNN and our long and productive and successful relationship. And in fact, so long that it is the longest relationship I've ever had!

I accept in the name of my first boss, who was my boss even before getting to CNN, WJAR-TV investigative reporter Jim Taricani, who recently underwent incarceration rather than reveal his sources and taught me everything I needed to know about having the courage of my convictions.

I accept in the name of all of my colleagues and friends, people like CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth, who was shot in the face while we were covering the war in Bosnia; for our two Iraqi journalists who were slain in the early days of the war, and for all my other friends like we've mentioned tonight, like Bob and Kimberly, who have been wounded in the trenches. And for those friends who will never come back but who are always in my heart and who have taught me about heart and valor and sacrifice and strength.

I accept in the name of a shared endeavor in this business that I love, and the business is reporting the world. And today, more than ever, I accept in the name of telling the truth.

I just returned from assignment for a new documentary we are making, we were in Israel, and I was reunited with some of the old "golden oldies" as I like to say, the cameramen and producers, who I've worked with many, many years. And we laughed, we cried, we ate, we drank, and we did a little work. But we also reminisced about the glory days. Not just about our travels and the fun we had, but about the earth-shattering events we covered. The sheer significance. The globe-stopping, heart-pounding importance of what was out there. The way not just news junkies but everybody took notice, even ordinary people did too.

How I remember being in New York in late 1989 -- I hadn't yet been set loose as a foreign correspondent but I wanted to, but not early enough to see the Berlin Wall fall. But there I was, as a producer and correspondent at the CNN bureau in New York and everyone was talking about it, from the diners to the cabbies, on the streets, wherever you went, "Wow, did you see the wall? Did you see it come down?" I couldn't wait to get up and go at it.

I remember sitting on my couch in my New York City rental back in 1990, glued to the screen, along with the rest of the world, as we watched Nelson Mandela walk free after 28 years in prison. None of us knew: What would he look like? What would he sound like? What would he do?

I watched the Soviet empire fall and I watched a former CNN president lend Mikhail Gorbachev the pen with which he signed the Soviet empire out of existence, and ended 70 years of tyranny.

I reported from one successful Iraq-Gulf War and I reported another one that has turned into tragedy. I watched one U.S. president send U.S. troops to Somalia to end a famine and save lives, and I watched another U.S. president not send troops to Rwanda and a million people perished. I watched brilliant, heroic leaders like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel and reported on craven, vicious brutes like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and al Qaeda.

I watched war and peace and pain and joy and I tried to tell the stories, the human stories of the people caught up in all of this. And despite the agony we endured as witnesses, there was also a kind of ecstasy.

I told you how my colleagues and I recently laughed and reminisced, because the ecstasy was in knowing that it mattered, knowing that it shook people, touched their hearts, made them think and fired their imaginations. Knowing at the very least that we were witnessing history and bringing it back to people, and at the very best, we could actually make a difference. We lived large and we thought large; we were filled with the possibility of what was out there and what we could contribute. I will never forget.

And for me my proudest experience is having reported the war in Bosnia, all the years of the Balkan wars, there we were out there. And I truly to this day believe that by simply doing our journalists' duty that we made a difference and in the end, late though it was, we made it unpalatable for our free democracies to tolerate that kind of carnage live on television year after year. And we eventually, I believe, encouraged an intervention that stopped the war, that stopped genocide and therefore we were up to the task. We counted when it mattered on our watch. And that, to me, is my proudest achievement and the proudest achievement, I'm sure, of all my colleagues, whether they were at the U.S. networks here or around the world, whether they were at The New York Times, The Washington Post and all the other newspapers and other news stations that were out there -- that was a genuine accomplishment and that shows the power of great and positive television news reporting.

Recently I read in The New York Times about Darfur and about how Mia Farrow, who is not only an actress but a UNICEF special ambassador, how she encouraged her colleague Steven Spielberg (who is going to do the Opening Ceremonies at the China Olympics) to pressure the Chinese, to pressure the Sudanese, to stop that genocide in Darfur. And how, for the first time, the Chinese have got out there, toured the camps and have made some demarches to the Sudanese government and hopefully it will work.

People like Nick Christof kept Darfur in the news all the time. People right now at CNN and many other places are out in the world doing incredible and heroic work; our journalists in Baghdad and all the others, our journalists around the world. We are the eyes and ears of all of you and all of the viewers. That's what we signed on to and that's what we consider our holy and our sacred trust. When I talk to and mentor young people who want to be journalists today, I tell them that my most fervent hope is that they find something that sets them on fire, that gives them the pride and passion and joy as CNN did, and that the work we've done together, has done for me. Something that instills a deep sense of commitment, a sense of mission, a sense of vision, a sense of sacrifice as well. But I think we would all agree, if we were being honest, that it is not easy convincing young journalists today, it's not easy or exactly clear what we should be urging them to emulate and to strive for. I've spent my career, as I've said, trying be the eyes and ears of our viewers using my ability through CNN to travel the world and bring back the most important and the just plain interesting stories that I have always believed are valuable and vital to a functioning mature society. We in the foreign news field have a long and valiant tradition; the old trench coat and notebook have meant so much more than a good look, a good expense account and collecting air miles on someone else's dime. We have roughed it and toughed it around the world on a mission to tell people just what is going on. During World War II, icons like Edward R. Murrow broke news and shared experiences of war that formed America's collective story and still resonate today. His name is on that [Paul White] bowl, and I am proud.

During the Cold War, through Vietnam, who could forget the blood curdling dispatches of Arnett, Halberstam, Safer and eventually Cronkite, telling the nation Vietnam as it really was. When it came to our generation, we tried to live up to our forefathers and sisters. Through the Gulf War, the Bosnia war, the Somalia war, the Rwanda war, all the crisis and calamities and all the joyful stories, the elections the freedoms and revolutions, the casting aside of the shackles of tyranny and despotism, we really believed that it really matters even to viewers on this continent of prosperity and power.

Right about when I was starting, though, we were beginning to be told that foreign news was actually less and less important. Because after Communism fell, everyone seemed to think it was a signal to beat a retreat from the arduous, dedicated, expensive mission that is covering foreign news. Paradoxically, the one surge of hope at 9/11 was that we had the stories and those stories were vital, but they started to shrink. We didn't retreat or shrink, but airtime does keep shrinking.

This while a recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans worry about America's foreign policy today its direction and place in the world today. At the same time of all of this, when we should be bringing facts and information, the space devoted to all hard news is getting smaller and is now being encroached upon by editorial commentary, which has come marching, I think, arrogantly into our space.

I am against the politicization of news and facts. I have reached a new red for myself: under the tsunami of ideological, highly politicized and highly opinionated talk masquerading as news, I now define myself as a fact-based reporter.

Several years ago to the RTNDA I fretted about the line between news and entertainment blurring. Now I think it's really blurring. And in some areas, it has almost completely disappeared. I know our leaders, our corporate leaders, our news directors, our bosses are in a struggle. I know that our industry is in a struggle of how to react to the Internet and the rise of other platforms, to the fracturing of the audience. But I still believe it's all about making choices. I am really proud and take great satisfaction in CNN's new morning news program, which is devoted to even more hard news than it was before. It started today and you can imagine with the story that has happened today it's an incredibly vital function that the morning news program is going to provide. CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer regularly wins its afternoon time slot with a diet of hard news. I am pleased to be able to continue my hard news work, whether in breaking news or documentary form, and always to be supported by CNN in this pursuit.

Again the dreadful shootings in Virginia remind us how vital TV news is and how vital television is to providing the community experience that we need as a society to react to these things that happen in our backyard or even further afield.

On some occasions though, we seem to have a hard time getting the balance straight. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that 25 percent of airtime on morning and cable TV news was recently devoted to Anna Nicole Smith. Even Oprah Winfrey was moved to take some of her audience to task for what she called their "morbid fascination with nothingness."

Columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote in The New York Times: "There are lots of important stories out there, but none so much fun as Anna Nicole Smith. Never mind," he said, "that al Qaeda getting its act together again in Pakistan, never mind the U.S. in the midst of an increasingly ugly war in Iraq, that global warming is on our horizon." He said that judging by the amount of airtime we know which is much more important. He went on to say that the line between news and entertainment was blurred long ago until news, in some instances, is now entertainment.

But who would have believed, he said, that Neil Postman may yet be proved right that we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death? I hope that this is exaggerated, and I hope that it's not true, but ladies and gentlemen: I strongly believe, and history shows us, that our identities, the identities of our nations, and of our great civilizations, are built on stories. Do we really want the meaning of our civilization to be defined by the likes of Anna Nicole Smith?

Once, after the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. He now says he was much misquoted and misunderstood, but we are in the huge complicated cataclysmic grip of a new round of history. Liberal democracy is in the fight of its life. We are in a great civilizational struggle. And I wonder whether we as crucial players, because we are crucial players in society, are up to the challenge? I ask often: Is our great cultural debate over Britney's pate? Do we really want to think so small in this most powerful country in the world? Do we want our culture and civilization defined by racist or sexist discourse over our public airwaves? Or by bullying, meanspirited frog-marching banter, all of which may exist on the fringes but now seems to encroach on the center? Do we want to contribute to an insular and selfish and uninformed and thus weakened society, or do we want to help maintain a robust democracy with a fully informed electorate?

Throughout my career, I have debated my colleagues and my superiors, as Jim will attest to, on the importance of foreign news, and CNN is still committed to it. I've always said that I believe Americans do want foreign and serious news, will tune in to a well told and relevant story, and these days, I believe, they really hunger for it.

Out in the lobby when I was in the CNN tent and I was meeting people, I met news directors and some local news reporters who were saying that, for instance. Juan Calvert, a news reporter I met, spoke about what great experience she had at a three-month internship at CNN in London. I spoke to a news director who lamented that when he brings people in and interviews them for jobs, he's shocked by the lack of knowledge of the world and also a lack of basic knowledge of things happening in this country. I think that it's vital that Americans know about the rest of the world, because let's just think -- one example, without knowing languages, for instance, the U.S. military is in trouble in Iraq. There are not enough people who speak Arabic. This is a tangible problem and because, I think there's not enough attention paid to language, knowledge and all the rest of it, in the rest of the world.

Again, I know you all, and our corporate leaders, wage a struggle for eyeballs; we need to keep people watching us because what we do is important. How to do it? I know adolescents are the main consumers of mass culture, but I hope we don't totally surrender the news agenda to them. I know it's good to get younger people on board, and of course they have the maximum buying power. But surely our historic role is to report the world not just enrich our shareholders, who we are plenty enriching anyway.

Recently at the Getty Museum, I came across a quote by John Paul Getty. He said, a long time ago, "Everyone talks about how much money I make. I wonder what sort of accomplishment it is to make a lot of money."

He also said, "In my opinion, an individual without any love of arts cannot be considered completely civilized."

Exchange "art" for a "love of knowledge and information" and the point is much the same. I know we are not teachers or demagogues, but surely we have a basic duty to provide basic information. If it's true, as a recent poll found, that a majority of high schoolers in this country still can't find Iraq on a map, that's their teachers' problem and it's also our problem. It means we aren't doing our job. Iraq is not a faraway country, it is not an exotic place. It's where their country is at war, where more than 3,000 of their soldiers have been killed and more than 26,000 soldiers have been wounded in their name. It's important they know where it is on a map. I think we have a role to play in enlarging the kind of knowledge that is necessary to survive in today's world.

As I said in the beginning, I accept this award more than ever in the name of truth. Since I believe we, as the media, were partly enablers in this war, by falling for the old canard: "You're either with the terrorists or you're with us," it's worth again remembering that our job is to question, question, question, that our job is to be rigorous-it's basic. The legendary CBS journalist Fred Friendly once said, "Our job is not to make up anybody's mind, but to make the agony of decision-making so intense that the only way to escape is by thinking." I believe we failed, and now the agony is in Iraq, in America, and in all the places around the world where that decision is reverberating. And for the last six years, this has been profoundly depressing to me. Because I believe in the great power of great television. I think surely we must speak the truth always, whether it's convenient or not. I believe we must never be afraid of power, but must always hold it accountable. We should never exaggerate the bad or go off on some kind of rant, we should just stay with the facts and the truth. As Edward R. Murrow put it, we must never be confused into mistaking dissent for disloyalty. Or as David Ben-Gurion put it, Israel's first and feisty prime minister who said at the time of Israel's difficult birth as a state, "The test of democracy is freedom of criticism."

I do not need to go over the desperate shortage of truth, the pervasion of power, the infringement of basic constitutional civil liberties, the abandonment of basic human rights, torture, and the corruption of our basic duty as the fourth estate, which I think means a rigorous press corps. All these things that have sadly, unfortunately, been the hallmark of the last six years. I just thank God we are straightening up again, making a necessary course correction.

And let me be clear, for the record, my only agenda and my only loyalty is to the truth and to purveying information, to staying as close to the objective truth as we possibly can. And so as we battle on into more testing waters ahead, just to quote the Financial Times on a looming Iran confrontation: "From the Guys Who Gave Us the Iraq War, Another Fine Idea."

I personally will make sure to dot every I and cross every T on this one. I hope we will make the threshold of proof higher this time. But already on some airwaves you've got a similar cast of shouting characters, people who would not know a Khomeni from a Khamenei, holding forth on the righteousness of their opinion. As I said, with any luck we will hold them to a higher standard next time.

So what is our duty? What's our point? In the end, what are we doing here? What are we doing with this powerful tool? I still fiercely believe that what we do is, and must be, as important as ever. And I have come to believe that what we do must also have a moral relevance. I do it because I am convinced that we who have a voice must use it carefully. We must always watch our words and weigh our words because words have consequences. By saying to myself that a strong and robust democracy needs strong and independent and honest journalists who are committed to reporting without fear or favor. I do it because I respect the American people and the people around the world who make up CNN's global audience and I respect their right to know and their need to care. And if they don't, I still believe it's my job to help them know and care. I do it because I believe, as others do, that we live in a society after all, not just a marketplace. And I do it because I still believe the news operation should be the crown jewel in all of our corporations, it should be the thing that makes a corporation feel good about itself.

And despite the advance and power of the Internet, television remains the most powerful medium ever, and if you doubt it, ask why Russia's regime has closed down, and supporters have gunned down, independent TV reporters there. Why do they not close the newspapers? Because they don't have the same power. Ask why our friends here and around the world, who seek truth and independent information, are regularly attacked and killed. It's not an accident. The Committee to Protect Journalists continues to report that the leading cause of death among journalists around the world is deliberate. It's murder.

And so I am proud to continue a proud tradition. I am proud to have found my reporter's voice and am profoundly grateful to CNN that I have been allowed to use it. I am proud and pleased when someone comes up to me and says, "We find you very useful!"

And I am proud, for instance, when the captain of the airline that flew me here slipped me this note. It reads, "Ms. Amanpour: You and Tim Russert are the best journalists on TV. Keep up the good work, and thank you for flying United."

Thank you all very, very much.

Upon being handed the bowl: "There's even JFK's name inscribed on there in 1961. So I really am humbled by the incredible company that I'm in. Thank you."

Comments

Add Comment