Background and career
Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour ( ; Persian: کریستیان امانپور, romanized: Kristiān Amānpur; born 12 January 1958) is an Iranian-British journalist and television host. Amanpour is the Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of CNN International's nightly interview program Amanpour, CNN's The Amanpour Hour on Saturdays and Amanpour & Company on PBS. She also hosts Christiane Amanpour Presents The Ex-Files with her former husband James Rubin on Global.
Amanpour was born in the West London suburb of Ealing, the daughter of Mohammad Taghi Amanpour (Iranian) and Anne Patricia Hill (British). Her father was Shia Muslim and her mother Roman Catholic. Amanpour was raised in Tehran until the age of eleven, when she was sent to England to attend the Convent of the Holy Cross, an all-girls preparatory boarding school in Chalfont Saint Peter, Buckinghamshire. At 16, she moved to New Hall School, a Roman Catholic school in Chelmsford, Essex. After finishing her education in England, Amanpour returned to Iran. Her father worked as an airline executive for Iran Air, and lost his job and fortune in 1979 due to the Iran Revolution. In 1979, the family moved to the United States, where she studied journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her time there, she worked in the news department at WBRU-FM in Providence, Rhode Island. She also worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence as an electronic graphics designer. In 1983, Amanpour graduated from the university summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism.
In 1983, Amanpour was hired by CNN on the foreign desk in Atlanta, Georgia, as an entry-level desk assistant. By 1986, she served as a correspondent for CNN's New York bureau. During her early years as a correspondent, she was given her first major assignment covering the Iran–Iraq War, followed by a transfer in 1986 to Eastern Europe to report on the fall of European communism. In 1989, she was assigned to work in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time. Following Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990, Amanpour's reports of the Persian Gulf War brought her wide notice. Thereafter, she reported from the Bosnian war and other conflict zones. While in Bosnia, she interviewed Serb general Ratko Mladic, who would later be convicted of genocide. Because of her emotional delivery from Sarajevo during the Siege of Sarajevo, viewers and critics questioned her professional objectivity, claiming that many of her reports were unjustified and favoured the Bosnian Muslims, to which she replied:
"There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral, you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing." Amanpour gained a reputation for fearlessness during the Gulf and Bosnian wars for reporting from conflict areas. From 1992 to 2010, Amanpour was CNN's chief international correspondent. From 2009 to 2010, she was the anchor of Amanpour, a daily CNN interview program. Amanpour has reported on major crises from many of the world's hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans and from the United States during Hurricane Katrina. She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe, Africa and beyond, including Iranian presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan, and Syria, among others. After 9/11, she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Other interviewees have included Hillary Clinton, Nicolás Maduro, Hassan Rouhani, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, John Kerry, the Dalai Lama, Robert Mugabe and Moammar Gadhafi. She has also conducted interviews with Constantine II of Greece, Reza Pahlavi, Ameera al-Taweel and actors Angelina Jolie, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. From 1996 to 2005, she was contracted by 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt to file four to five in-depth international news reports a year as a special contributor. These reports garnered her a Peabody Award in 1998 (she had earlier been awarded one in 1993). Hewitt's successor Jeff Fager terminated her contract.
On 9 October 1994, Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times criticized Amanpour's general coverage of the Bosnian War. Kinzer quoted a colleague's description of Amanpour as she reported on a terrorist bombing in the Markale marketplace of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo:
[Christiane Amanpour] was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She assumed an omniscience that no journalist has. Amanpour has responded to the criticism levelled on her reporting from the war in the former Yugoslavia for "lack of neutrality", stating:
