“I never in a million years thought I would be up here on stage appealing for the freedom and safety of American journalists at home.”

That’s how Christiane Amanpour began her acceptance speech for the International Press Freedom Award given to her by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Amanpour is one of those strong, steady, fearless journalistic voices. She’s a respected international correspondent who has spent time the world’s hot spots. She understands what attacks on the press look like. She hosts persecuted journalists on her program. She knows whereof she speaks.

Her entire speech talks about freedom of the press around the world, but she keeps returning to her fears, which she hopes won’t turn into reality, of a cowed and cooperative media in this country. Here are a few excerpts.

I was chilled when [Trump’s] first tweet after the election was about “professional protesters incited by the media.” He walked back the part about the protesters but not the part about the media. We are not there but, postcard from the world: this is how it goes with authoritarians like Sisi, Erdoğan, Putin, the Ayatollahs, Duterte, et al.

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well:

First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating—until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison—and then who knows?

. . .

A great America requires a great and free and safe press. So this above all is an appeal to protect journalism itself. Recommit to robust fact-based reporting without fear or favor—on the issues. Don’t stand for being labelled crooked or lying or failing. Do stand up together—for divided we will all fall.

. . .

I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.

I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth. And we have to be prepared to fight especially hard for the truth in a world where the Oxford English Dictionary just announced its word of 2016: post-truth.

We have to accept that we’ve had our lunch handed to us by the very same social media that we’ve so slavishly been devoted to. The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people.  Combined with the most incredible development ever—the tsunami of fake news sites—aka lies—that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

. . .

I feel that we face an existential crisis, a threat to the very relevance and usefulness of our profession.

Now, more than ever, we need to commit to real reporting across a real nation, a real world in which journalism and democracy are in mortal peril, including by foreign powers like Russia paying to churn out and place false news, and hacking into democratic systems here and allegedly in upcoming crucial German and French elections too.

Writers across the country are speaking eloquently and passionately about the concerns Amanpour talks about. We ignore them at our peril.

A “Which-ACLU-America-Hater-Said-This?” Bonus Quiz: Who said he would only outlaw flag-burning “if I were king,” and went on to say that the First Amendment protects “speech critical of the government. That’s the main type of speech tyrants would seek to suppress.” Nope, not Noam Chomsky. Not the ACLU. Not some radical First Amendment rights lawyer. It was late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who signed onto a court opinion in 1989 that flag burning is constitutionally protected. He made the statement during an interview on CNN decades after the opinion was written.

This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2016.

28 replies on “T.H.R.E.A.T. Watch: Journalist Christiane Amanpour Is Worried”

  3. David, you quote Amanpour:

    “…we have to be prepared to fight especially hard for the truth in a world where the Oxford English Dictionary just announced its word of 2016: post-truth.”

    And you agree with that? “We have to be prepared to fight especially hard for the TRUTH”? I’d like to remind you here, publicly, that when in 2014 you heard someone complain that a candidate you supported had lied about data in a public meeting and had been caught doing so, you mocked the individual who complained about the lying and told her not to “get her panties in a twist” or “have a case of the vapors” about a little lying by an elected official?

    There were several witnesses to that conversation.

    FYI a commitment to the truth, to have any validity, has to be UNIFORM. It is a commitment to the truth when it’s Donald Trump violating the TRUTH, as well as when it’s a candidate you’ve endorsed violating the TRUTH.

    (Here, again, in case you’ve forgotten, is the definition of HYPOCRITE, provided to you recently by another one of the commenters on your blogs: “someone who claims to have moral standards or beliefs to which his own behavior does not conform.”)

  4. Dear Trump Supporters: your man won. He is going to be everyone’s president. Congratulations. Be proud of your win.

    As we move forward, though, please don’t respond to a lie by our president with something about a lie by Hillary. That battle is done. It’s not about Donald versus Hillary anymore. Please don’t assume that everything President Trump says is the gospel truth, or everything in the mainstream media is a lie. I want him to succeed as president, so he has my support until he loses it. Please let’s hold him to the standard of this great office.

  7. Why is what the blowhard POTUS-elect SAYS about flag burning, libel, and a slanted media more troublesome that what the current POTUS does? Either the Standing Rock protests is (a) an example of the government attacking journalists and peaceful protesters via their proxy law enforcement agencies, or (b) a bunch of left wing nut jobs attacking a contractor performing a lawful project. I know which version I believe to be true, but I suspect the general Tucson Weekly reader would choose (a), in which case these crimes are being committed under the “most transparent of all time” Obama administration.

  8. OMG! Why, when anyone says anything critical of Trump, the only thing his supporters can come back with is “Yeah, but Hillary…!!!” Give me a break. Can you not just respond about your guy? Ours lost. We lost, In my opinion, the American people lost.

    I agree with David and Christiane’s message. The media has to figure out how to do their job in this post-truth, Trumpian world. A free press has played a major role in making America the greatest democracy in the world and is absolutely key to keeping it that way!!

  9. David Safier supports and excuses lying politicians and lying administrators of public institutions then they are on his side of the political spectrum.

    When it comes to all this “let’s support the TRUTH” rhetoric, he has nary a leg, nor a foot, nor even a toe to stand on. He is a HYPOCRITE, benefiting from the inattentiveness of many of his audience, who don’t follow what he writes closely enough from one blog post to the next to know that the same man who excoriates Republican LIARS in one post is excusing Democratic LIARS and throwing cloaks over their inexcusable actions in office in another.

    This is EXACTLY the kind of POST-TRUTH behavior in the media that undermines the public’s trust and destroys the possibility for constructive political discourse in this sad country.

    I am a Democrat, but I want BOTH Democrats and Republicans to be held accountable for telling the TRUTH.

  10. We have just witnessed eight years of a supposed free media manipulate the country to the point that their own polls proved that the public is fed up with them and their partisan lies. I blame them for getting Trump elected. That and the fact that Obama has not helped our country. Instead he has buried us in debt and problems, all the while promising hope and change.

    Pelosi is proof. Democrats have failed us and the media helped.

  11. How wonderful ….Christiane Amanpour, a British-Iranian journalist employed by the Clinton News Network (CNN) lecturing America on Trump … pardon me while I gag….

  12. To quote Reagan, “there you go again” Danehick. Christiane wasn’t lecturing America and she wasn’t talking about Trump. She WAS talking to other journalists about their need to step up and report the facts and question our leaders. in order to ensure the survival of our democracy.

  14. “Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prisonand then who knows?”

    You mean that journalists are being treated as poorly as Christians are? How did that happen?

  16. That’s right CW13 this is what they stand for and who they back:

    June, President Obama participated in a PBS townhall and was asked about Trump’s promise to keep Carrier’s Indiana plant in the U.S. The townhall participant — Eric Cottonham, a member of the Steelworkers Union employed by Carrier — asked Obama if anything could be done to stem the tide of jobs flowing out of the country, as Trump had recently promised to do.
    “I see here youre doing a lot of things, but in Indianapolis, theres nothing there for us,” he asked. “I mean, whats next? I mean, what can we look forward to in the future as far as jobs, employment, whatever? Because all of our jobs has left or in the process of leaving, sir.
    “Those jobs of the past are just not going to come back,” Obama told Cottonham.
    Instead, Obama advised workers losing their jobs to learn how to adapt their skills to “some of these new technologies,” in particular, the “clean energy sector.”

    https://news.grabien.com/story-flashback-obama-mocks-trump-promising-keep-carrier-plant-us

    Yes why not spend your final days promoting global warming? Get a heavy coat on and get out there. Time is a wastin’.

  17. So, 90% of the mainstream media did editorials supporting Hillary, and they are surprised that her opponent, the victor , thinks they are against him ? It would seem that the well-credentialed elite doesn’t like any Republican president, and they are ginning up reasons to not like Trump . If you want to keep trashing him, that’s your prerogative . But don’t pretend that it has anything to do with objectivitity or “reporting”.

  18. I know I’m not loved around here but you have to give me credit, when I’m wrong I admit it and I was just that. Trump did not save 1,000 American jobs. The actual number was 1,100 !!

  19. You are loved C dub. Why else would they keep talking at you? The jobs saved is not the only issue here. We have a President that said “those OLD jobs are gone forever.” Do you know why? Because his party and he exported our jobs through NAFTA and TPP and massive regulation and taxation.

    While deporting our jobs they they imported illegal workers. That robbed Americans of income, businesses of revenue, and taxes from federal, state, social security and medicare.

    No honest person can defend those actions. They have punished Americans. And the voters figured it out.

    The first clue? Solyndra.

  26. Nobody has to gin up reasons not to like Trumputin – the traitor to America – Putin’s pocket buddy, rapist, tax evader, narcissist, and business failure. But I see his tiny impotent supporters are here, crying and flinging their own poo, unable as always to provide valid sources or form cogent arguments about anything.

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