The News Sorority Page 45

  Being an interviewer was “her dream job,” this person continues, and she was “driven by [the fact that] she’s got a child now; she doesn’t want to risk her life. That’s certainly justifiable. It makes perfect sense. But the thing is that being a great interviewer is an entirely different skill from being a field correspondent.” Murrow and Cronkite and Jennings, of course, had made the leap. But the times were different, not to mention the fact that network dynamics were different for men in that male-dominated world. Christiane had spent her best—her strongest—years outside the system. She had defied Walter Isaacson (who was no longer the president of CNN; now Jonathan Klein was); she had let her stories run overlength. In malarial dens and overcrowded HIV wards and Taliban football fields and mass murderers’ putrid prisons, she’d done her thing—boldly, bravely, with little interference. She had done all this from thousands of miles away from cubicled offices. Coming into the world of suits and office politics—a world she’d last encountered years before by way of fights with Jeanee von Essen, the world that Diane and Katie had always navigated, in their very different and differently canny ways—put Christiane at a disadvantage she may have forgotten about, or perhaps she even may have felt above.

  The thinking at CNN was that being a “great interviewer” meant being an “analyst, someone who helps us understand why things happen. That’s different from being a person who stands at the front line and tells us what is happening,” the CNN representative continues. “Christiane was great at the latter. No one was better. She was great at getting there, and chasing the rabbit—riding along the way” of a galloping international news story. “What was required now, if you’re going to shift into a different specialty, you have to learn the specialty. It’s a different set of skills.” In other words, the CNN executives were deliberating about her desire for her “dream job” and privately concluding that Christiane would have to, figuratively speaking, “go back to school.”

  Meanwhile, for the final installment in the God’s Warriors series—“Buddha’s Warriors”—Christiane interviewed the Dalai Lama, flying to India, where he has lived openly since he fled Tibet in the 1950s. Just as the interview was beginning, all the power went out in a thunderstorm. As they all sat in darkness, “the Dalai Lama lets out the biggest laugh,” says Andrew Tkach, who produced the segment. The CNN team interpreted the laugh as: “This is God’s will!” Christiane was taken by how the Dalai Lama “mesmerized” his followers. But the message of the impeccably timed thunderstorm, the power outage, the total darkness, and the fecklessness of destiny might have augured her own fate: Once she returned to New York, she would not get the CNN “dream job” she wanted.

  While Christiane was doing “Buddha’s Warriors,” CNN hired Fareed Zakaria, the young Mumbai-born Harvard PhD who had been the managing editor of Foreign Affairs and the editor of Newsweek International, to be its one p.m. Sunday news analyst. One o’clock Sunday was the perfect hour for a CNN news analysis show—you’d get the news-interested viewers coming off the morning major network news roundups (Meet the Press, This Week, and Face the Nation) and the noon replay of State of the Nation. The executives were very impressed with Zakaria’s ability to, as one puts it, “listen to disparate strands and then come up with his own insight.”

  Management broke down the differences between the two this way: “Christiane’s famous for going out, being on the story, while Fareed is parallel in his ability to sit in his office and pull together—synthesize—the underlying meaning of those events. She knows her subject very well, but she doesn’t approach these stories in an intellectual way. Like [that of] many foreign correspondents, her knowledge is experiential but it’s not analytical. Great foreign correspondents love to be the witness—they have to have the front-row seats at these events—but they don’t want to spend a hell of a lot of time chewing them over; they want to go on to the next one.”

  Christiane was angered by their reasoning. “She didn’t buy this explanation that he was great at what he does and that she does something entirely different,” continues the person who heard the management conversations. She was very offended that we had hired him to do what she saw as her dream job.” Her attitude was: “‘Why did they hire him and not me?’”

  Further, she didn’t buy management’s patronizing view that “none of us ever doubted that she would be able to master” the kind of news analysis that Zakaria was doing, “but it was going to take work.” To someone who had risked her life all over the world—as Zakaria had not done—the idea of this vague additional “work” in the total safety of a studio must have seemed absurd, if not insulting. At least some in management viewed her attitude as arrogant and entitled, an appraisal that would likely not have been the case with a man. “It was difficult for her to imagine” that this one p.m. news analysis spot “wasn’t just going to be handed to her. She would say things like, ‘Do you know that I’m the world’s best-known foreign correspondent?’ And, ‘I’m extremely well known all around the world.’” The response from management: “‘Yes, we know. You’re Christiane Amanpour—we all get that.’” Management’s sense remained that “in order to maintain that thing that stands for excellence and reliability and accuracy, you’ve got to work it.”

  Clearly, this infuriated Christiane. “She wanted her prime-time, agenda-setting show on CNN in the U.S.—where all America would watch her.” The executives had “no doubt she would get there.” But, continues the insider, they “wanted first to see her learn, to make her mistakes in a low-wattage environment—in the back.”

  As part of that “in the back,” Christiane was offered a daily half-hour show on CNN International, which would be broadcast only overseas, and she was also offered a “compilation” show on American CNN, on Sunday afternoon at two, right after Zakaria. Both shows would be called Amanpour. The U.S. show would weave together the best of her daily international shows. Both shows would debut in 2009.

  It took a long time for Christiane to find the right executive producer. She and CNN talked to what someone in the process recalls as “a long line of people—a lot of different people—for months,” starting in November 2008. Finally, in late March 2009, she chose the highly experienced Kathy O’Hearn, who had gone from CNN to ABC and had recently left executive producing George Stephanopoulos’s This Week to work on ABC’s 2008 election team. Kathy was a friend of Christiane’s new friend Willow Bay, and Kathy and Christiane had worked together, via international phone line, when Christiane was in Afghanistan and Kathy was producing American Morning. (Christiane had authoritatively told Kathy what time slot her piece would run in, brooking no disagreement.)

  Kathy immediately sensed the challenging newness—everyone did. “Christiane had done just about everything under the sun, but she had not anchored a show. She had anchored from war zones, she had done specials, but she had not anchored a regular daily talk show.” Another producer puts it more negatively: “She’s remarkable at what she used to do. Everybody gets her doing that.” Would they get her doing this? This producer privately thought, and says some others shared the thought: “She’s not really an American anchor.”

  Many things about the pending new CNN Amanpour shows were not ideal. “Two o’clock was a horrible time” for Sunday, Kathy O’Hearn says. By that time, after all the morning politics and policy shows, people were already off doing Sunday errands; they’d had enough TV. But she and Christiane didn’t fight the unfortunate time slot—“we knew we weren’t in a position to get one p.m. But we did fight to do it live. CNN wanted us to prerecord the shows because it would save money. But Christiane was very fierce about making sure we got to do it live, which is what gave it such a powerful vitality.”

  So already, in mid-2009, Christiane was not getting what she felt she deserved from the network for which she had done so much: She was being told she had to “work” to learn to be an analyst. She lost the prized one p.m. slot to Zakaria, whose live round-table-s
tyle show—touted by CNN as a “weekly global get-together,” with Fareed “boiling down, without dumbing down, complex issues”—was similar enough to hers that it was reasonable to worry that she’d feel redundant to viewers. And she had to fight to get her daily and weekly shows live. Management felt enthusiastic about her Sunday time slot: She would inherit “the perfect audience,” the insider recalls their thinking. “Anybody who’s watching Fareed and liking Fareed would stick around for Christiane’s show.” But Christiane felt that she, not Zakaria, was the main draw.

  Still, despite these setbacks, Kathy says she found Christiane’s attitude to be very positive. Having encountered the my-way-or-the-highway Christiane several years earlier, “I was surprised at how warm and welcoming she was,” Kathy says. “And how it was very much ‘just between us girls.’ And she wanted to include everyone on the staff at editorial meetings. If it was an intern who said, ‘Shouldn’t we be doing this story?,’ she wanted to hear it.”

  And Jamie, too, was involved in the show’s preparation. “He was almost a member of the staff,” O’Hearn says. “The week before the launch, we were over at her house, the whole team brainstorming over bagels. Jamie would float in and say, ‘No, that doesn’t make any sense,’ and then he’d float out for an hour, and then he’d come back in, sit down, and listen.” (He continued to be hands-on after the show started broadcasting. “He’d call the control room and say, ‘Hey, Christiane just mistakenly called the foreign minister the finance minister.’”)

  Bringing international news to Americans—news that educated Statesiders felt they needed to know but couldn’t curate and assess on their own—was the point of Amanpour. “She was excited about changing the concept of a Sunday show to be a bigger embrace of international news,” says O’Hearn. “She wanted to analyze the way power was perceived and wielded, and to be a passionate voice for women across the globe. And children—she was always touched by the children. She wanted to give a voice to the disenfranchised. She’s fierce about exposing injustices. It’s not a false posturing. It’s real.”

  • • •

  BOTH SHOWS LAUNCHED IN SEPTEMBER, and in advance of them Christiane appeared in TV promotions that simultaneously promoted the network itself. Over dramatic music there was a shot of a distressed baby. Then came her half-screen-wide face—the hair styling and makeup that hadn’t been part of her previous image made her freshly glamorous at fifty-one—staring into the viewers’ eyes. In her passionate, authoritative voice, she intoned: “You have seen the destruction caused by natural disasters. Witnessed the atrocities of war. You have listened to world leaders and leaders who want to rule the world. You have heard from men of God and men who kill in God’s name. Gazed into eyes filled with hope and seen hearts consumed with hopelessness. With CNN, you have followed the facts from around the world. Come with me and see where the story takes us next.”

  On September 15, the day before the show aired, Christiane appeared on Stephen Colbert, in what would become her post-down-parka uniform: smart dark blazer over crisp white shirt. Colbert raved about her exotic last name. She demurred that “it was a name that I was once told would never make it to television.” No! he countered. Her name was like “cozying up with a snifter of brandy in a Swiss chalet!” She said, of her new venture, “This is dangerous. This is scary.” She wasn’t kidding. War zones were her territory.

  Though O’Hearn felt she had “Scotch-taped” together the best of the daily international shows to make the weekend U.S. show, it did not feel like a compendium. With Christiane live at her sleek new desk emblazoned with “AMANPOUR,” the viewers received a digest of what and who was important in the world that week. In a sense, Sunday Amanpour was like Omnibus, the Ford Foundation–sponsored Sunday TV show hosted by Alistair Cooke between 1952 and 1961, or, more recently, the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, which turned into the PBS News Hour: a program meant to educate Americans about serious issues. In Amanpour’s case, she also introduced them to opinion-givers they might not know. Aside from foreign policy experts and world leaders, Christiane liked to interview little-known female heroes of the developing world, such as Liberian peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, as well as activist American women journalists on international issues, such as Amy Wilentz on Haiti. She also featured and conversed with underexposed young Iranian American women, like Farnaz Fassihi, the award-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal; Shirin Neshat, the filmmaker and activist who had recently gone on a three-day hunger strike at the UN to protest the Iranian elections; Azadeh Moaveni, the author of Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran; as well as très hip, gay Muslim reform advocate Irshad Manji, a kind of Rachel Maddow for Islam, with whom Christiane engaged in a standing-room-only conversation at Manhattan’s temple of talk, the 92nd Street Y. In fact, for younger Iranian Americans in the media—both women and men—who had repatriated to the United States as children with their parents after the Revolution, “Christiane was a role model for us,” says Karim Sadjadpour, a young man who is an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment. “Most Iranians we saw were doctors, engineers, pharmacists. But Christiane was on television! So it was, ‘Yeah!’ You would call your cousins: ‘Turn on CNN!’ She was like Madonna!”

  During the Sunday show’s first week on the air, “when there was still an air of mild chaos,” Kathy recalls, Christiane nevertheless came out swinging. The show scored a major, volatile get: an interview with Robert Mugabe, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, who was responsible for the killings of ten thousand to twenty thousand people. “Mugabe hadn’t done an interview in about twenty-five years. Why on earth he agreed to an interview with Christiane, of all people, I’ll never know!” Kathy says. “He came in with a really scary contingent of men in uniforms, and they stood around the studio in a way that was meant to be intimidating.” But Christiane “pinned him to the wall,” repeatedly questioning him about the political foe who’d been jailed without cause. Mugabe was “angry and uncomfortable and flummoxed and dumbstruck. He could not answer. Sitting in the control room, I almost started to feel bad for him. It was an incredibly dramatic moment.”

  Others followed, the tough alternating with the inspiring. Elias Khoury, a Palestinian whose son, a Hebrew University student, had been killed by a Palestinian terrorist while jogging, was honoring his son by funding an Arabic translation of Israeli author Amos Oz’s novel A Tale of Love and Darkness. Christiane had Khoury and Oz on the show together, but her blunt questioning made the meeting far more than a mere feel-good hour.

  In other shows she grilled Ehud Barak, Hamid Karzai, Tony Blair, Tzipi Livni, and representatives of countries from the Caribbean to Eastern Europe to Africa. “We did topics that nobody else was covering,” says Kathy. “The secession of South Sudan from Sudan. The looming global water crisis. Sexual slavery in India. The selling of wives in India.” Christiane had brought her decade and a half of fieldwork into the studio.

  Was the show a little too worthy, a bit too wholesome for Americans to flip on after brunch? Christiane’s voice was unalloyed, erudite English—was there an intimidation factor there? “It was very successful in a quiet way in the States,” O’Hearn says, pointing to an industry index—the C3—that tabulates how long people stay with a program through commercials, and how much it’s DVR’d. “It had incredible numbers that way, and it was a blow-away hit overseas.”

  But “overseas” didn’t count so much, and management saw things differently. “Her show, creatively, was not that strong in the beginning. She wasn’t that comfortable as an interviewer,” says one who listened to the executive conversations. “The ratings were pretty weak. She was not growing her audience off of her lead-in. And her show was either losing viewers from Fareed’s show or she was holding flat and Fareed’s audience was slightly growing. So it wasn’t impressive ratings-wise, but that was okay.” Management “never, ever gave her a hard time.” They did things “to tweak the show.” They were confident
it would improve.

  But Christiane, says this source, blamed her placement after Zakaria’s show for the problems. “She began insisting that it was because of the lead-in—it was wrong to put these two shows back-to-back; people were tired of foreign news by the time her show came on.”

  While these conversations were going on, the Amanpour staff threw a surprise fifty-second birthday party for their boss. They made a secret gag reel. “We took the Beatles tape, ‘You say it’s your birthday,’ and we wore ridiculous hats and danced around, mouthing the words. We found footage of her from when she first started at CNN, with those huge-shoulder-padded jackets. We put those in. We had her son, Darius, in there playing air guitar. Then we surprised her. We brought her into the morning meeting and said, ‘Christiane, you have to look at this tape first, it’s a big problem—Atlanta is saying we can’t use it.’ She said, ‘I don’t have time.’ But we insisted. Then the crazy birthday tape played. It was hilarious. She laughed out loud. She was really touched. It was a perfect birthday.” And fitting for a pioneer at the network for over a quarter of a century.

  But that affection didn’t translate into any moves by management to elevate her exposure. Zakaria was promoted from his one p.m. slot to ten a.m.: the star spot, right there with the major Sunday shows. Why? “Fareed had been on the air about a year and a half before Christiane came. The thinking was, ‘Okay, Fareed has worked out his kinks—he’s gaining momentum. It was the most DVR’d show on our schedule, and that was a sign that the audience really didn’t want to miss it. So let’s create more opportunities for the thing to be seen.