‘Our job is to be truthful not neutral’: Christiane Amanpour on Trump, tech and and fighting for the truth | CNN

Just occasionally, in more than 40 years of reporting the world’s troubles, Christiane Amanpour has forced herself to step away and pause for breath. One of those moments for rebooting came over Christmas and new year, when she took a holiday in South Africa. I met her on the day she got back to work at the CNN offices in London, from which she makes her nightly news programme, and Saturday’s The Amanpour Hour. There is a powerful sense of her team buckling up for the tumultuous year ahead. “What I cover is the international reverberations of what America does in the world and what might be coming back at America,” she says. “The good, the bad and the ugly.”

Amanpour’s choice of holiday destination was, inevitably, not unrelated to the immediate challenges of that role as kickstarted by the second inauguration of President Trump this week in Washington DC. Before that she wanted to holiday somewhere, she suggests, that represented a robust spirit of hope. She had always regretted missing out on perhaps the greatest good news story of our lives: the release of Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison and his subsequent rise to power. “I was covering all the really bad stories, the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnia war,” she says. “And I’ve always felt a little sad I missed that, because I do strongly believe that good things happen in this world. I don’t ever want to only focus on the bad. South Africa is obviously still a huge work in progress, but it was just phenomenal to see it, even as a holiday.”

It is, of course, never wise to interview one of the great interviewers. Amanpour announced herself as a fearless interrogator when, during the Bosnian war, she accused Bill Clinton live on air of “flip-flopping” while Serbia pursued genocide. The president lost his cool with the young reporter, but the exchange is credited with playing a significant part in the shift of US foreign policy, and Nato’s successful intervention to end the carnage. Since then she has gone toe-to-toe with everyone from Yasser Arafat – who slammed the phone down on her – to Slobodan Milošević and Bashar al-Assad. No dictator has escaped from her forensic questioning unscathed. On her office door is a stolen street sign showing a Kalashnikov and text in English and Arabic reading “No guns allowed here”; Amanpour famously has enough of a mental armoury not to require help from ballistics.

She has two conversational modes, she says, fixing me with her gaze before we start. One includes a certain amount of umming and ahhing. The other, reserved for when the cameras are rolling, allows for no hint of hesitation or doubt. I suggest maybe chatty Christiane will be good. She smiles and does her level best, though in an hour in which she umms maybe twice, I can only imagine what it is like to sit opposite her when she is in full combat mode. Amanpour talks fast, anticipating three questions ahead. “Am I going to get cancelled for saying this?” she will ask, not quite in jest, or, at any slight suggestion that I ight be trying to put words into her mouth, “No, I really wouldn’t say that at all.”

Amanpour turned 67 a few days after we met, but you wouldn’t want to be the person who wonders if she might be thinking of slowing things down, professionally. She made her name as a reporter in the first Gulf War, when CNN’s pioneering of 24-hour news came of age, and has been the network’s – and liberal America’s – trusted and indomitable face of just about every conflict zone since. “Where there’s war there’s Amanpour,” colleagues used to say.

She brings all of that flak-jacket experience to bear on the jeopardies of the second Trump presidency. “I’ve had this last fortnight to really think hard about what comes next,” she says of CNN’s position in the crosshairs of Trump’s sinister promise to “straighten out” the factchecked media. She doesn’t want to prejudge the will of the American people, “but that is not to say that I’m going to sit back and be laissez-faire,” she says. “Iran will be on my radar, watching to see whether Trump will open a new war front, with Israel, against Iran’s nuclear programme. And, hugely important, how he plans to end Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.” And that’s before she gets to the president’s threats to Greenland and Panama.

Amanpour works to a trusted formula: “Our job is to be truthful, not neutral,” she says. When we speak, the news is full of the malign influence of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg on the global conversation.

As someone who originally owed her lucrative journalistic career to a billionaire, the “visionary” – her word – CNN founder Ted Turner, Amanpour is fully aware that rich men have always seen news as a business opportunity. Social media oligarchs, however, want to pocket the billions with none of the attendant responsibilities. Never a doom scroller, she sees Mark Zuckerberg’s utterly shameless decision to remove all factchecking from his Meta platforms as a drastic escalation of that policy.

“Of course, not everybody’s going to agree on everything and nor should they,” she says. “But unless we can agree that the sky outside is blue and the grass is green, we have no chance. What is overtaking the public square is that every single fact is now the subject of accusations of lies or bias. Zuckerberg enabling totally permissive commentary is another arrow in the heart of truth.”

Amanpour’s understanding of the importance of getting as near as possible to the reality of the toughest stories was ingrained in her as a young woman in Iran during the 1979 revolution. She had grown up – blissfully, she says – the oldest of four daughters of a “very English Catholic mother” and “a Persian Islamic father”. That particular love story had begun after Amanpour’s mother had, for an adventure, aged 20, driven her own father and some friends to a business meeting from London to Tehran in 1956.

Amanpour’s early life was rooted in Tehran where she learned about courage by riding horses from the age of four, and about love conquering all from her parents’ marriage. She went to boarding schools in England in her teens, but after her A-levels returned to Iran to witness the violent overthrow of her family’s whole way of life in the Iranian revolution (her soundtrack to that conflagration was I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor). Did she, I wonder, feel fated to her subsequent life from that moment?

“It was certainly the revolution that made me realise that [reporting] would be something I’d like to do,” she says. “I went to university in the US, studied journalism, got a job at a startup called CNN. That was 41 and a half years ago.”

I have a theory, I suggest, that journalists with her powerful sense of vocation partly pursue that life to explain their curious childhoods to themselves.

“That’s true to the extent that in a very patriarchal world, there was a matriarchy in my house. My mother used to tell me that each time she had another daughter, her Iranian friends were aghast. Some were all used to crying at the birth of a girl – and she had four! But my father was only thrilled to have all of us.”

She brought that contrarian faith – the knowledge that cross-cultural lives could be fabulous – to bear in her early understanding of the conflicts she covered.

“I grew up in a multiculture,” she says. “And I saw something similar in Sarajevo – decades of ethnically mixed coherence. Then the nationalists came to power and used [racial and religious] identity as their platform.” The horrors began. “That’s what is happening all over the world right now,” she says. “So I try to battle against that as much as I possibly can. And that is not easy, because you can imagine being an Iranian woman at this time – the slings and arrows come at you.”

In recent years, Amanpour has given those unbelievably brave women in Iran who have led the hijab protests against religious fanaticism a global platform on her show. When the current Iranian president insisted he would only be interviewed by Amanpour if she wore a headscarf, she refused.

She sees that struggle in her home country as a defining story of our times: “All these incredible women who are in jail who just will not be quiet,” she says. “There’s also a powerful undercurrent of resistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, despite everything. Women and girls forming alliances underground; trying to stay sane.”

She doesn’t see that thread of violent misogyny as a problem only of fundamentalist Islam. “Do you know what?” she says. “I think you will find that orthodoxies of all the established religions basically always go for us [women]. We always pay the price, the political price, the cultural price. Just look at what is happening in America.” Amanpour has been vocal on the late-night talkshows on the threats to the right to choose – “grumpy old men should never be making decisions about women’s bodies!”

She has also lived through that other great reckoning, the #MeToo movement. She took over her current PBS interview show (produced jointly with CNN) from the veteran anchor Charlie Rose, who was fired after being accused by more than 20 female colleagues of, among other things, turning his studio “into a sexual hunting ground”. Had she, I ask, witnessed that kind of behaviour from her own male bosses over the years?

“I was never aggressed or harassed in that way – or if I was, it was subtle, and nobody tried it twice,” she says. “But I certainly know many of my colleagues did endure that. When #MeToo exploded, there was that real anger; you know, just what is it about the fact that we have breasts and we have genitals that still appears to be a great big green go sign for half the population? I believe that everybody who engages in that behaviour needs to be held accountable.”

Amanpour has in the past mentioned the fact that she was not blonde and not American as significant early hurdles in her career on US television. She overcame them with a fabled determination to always go the extra mile as a reporter, to put herself in the harshest places. She has won 15 news and documentary Emmy awards, including last year’s Outstanding Breaking News Coverage for her efforts to explain the Israel-Hamas war to the American people. For many years she assumed her vocation would never be compatible with a settled home life. When she was approaching 40, though, she recalls one friend asking her: “So Christiane, what are you going to do, go home and hug your awards every night?”

That thought changed her, she says. She married the diplomat and journalist James Rubin in 1998. They had a son, Darius, in 2000 and based themselves in London, though Amanpour was frequently on the road again after 9/11. She has recalled how she never really feared for her own life when under fire on assignment, but how being a mother altered that – it was one reason that she chose to do a more studio-based show.

“I really stepped back from daily frontline reporting when we moved back to the United States, and my son was seven going on eight,” she says. “I felt, actually, that’s when he needed me most. I hope, I really believe, I was a good mother and a good family person because there is no more important thing.”

Amanpour’s marriage to Rubin ended in divorce in 2018. In June 2021, she began her CNN programme by telling viewers that she had recently had major surgery for ovarian cancer and would be taking further time off for chemotherapy. “That’s my news,” she said, characteristically moving quickly from the personal, “and now this is the news.”

In person, she gives the impression of being unscathed mentally, by recovery from that cancer or by any other experience. I’ve had several hard-bitten friends, I say to her, who have been in the places she has reported from and who have been badly haunted by those horrors in subsequent years. How has she avoided that?

She pauses for a moment. “I would say in that regard this last year has been a sort of crescendo,” she says. “Not only because of what I’ve seen in the field, but also this very poisonous and toxic environment we now live in. That does cause me a great deal of distress. But I’m very fortunate that I have never tried to hide it or drown it; I just talk about it. I get help when I need help.”

She hates the idea that there is a perceived glamour to the life she has chosen. “One thing I really get annoyed with is this notion that journalists – in every film, every magazine article I see – must really get off on the adrenaline. It’s so wrong; it trivialises what we do.”

I’m surprised, I say, as we are getting to the end of our allotted time, that she has never written a memoir – she must have been asked to many times. She smiles and suggests she is still not remotely ready to start looking back, not when there is still so much news up ahead of her.

I wonder, with this thought in mind, how often she has crossed swords directly with President Trump over the course of her career.

“Strangely,” she says, “never. Or once, actually. When he was a socialite I was among a group of press when he bought this new yacht for him and his then wife Ivana. I got a soundbite. I have a memory that he just called me ‘CNN’, just ‘CNN’.” She and her team have spent a lot of fruitless time trying to get him on her show, which in our world of hype and bluster would be really something to see: America’s childish nightmare finally meeting America’s grown-up conscience. “Let’s put it this way,” she says, imagining the prospect, before getting back to work. “I would have an awful lot of questions for him.”

Christiane Amanpour hosts Amanpour, weeknights at 6pm GMT and The Amanpour Hour, Saturdays at 4pm GMT, both on CNN