Christiane Amanpour’s biased reporting causes a backlash to her selection as host of ABC’s This Week

Indeed, if there is anything that seems to drive both Amanpour’s journalism and her view of the world, it is the politics of the liberal establishment. The LA Times recently quoted the dean of the College of Communications at South Carolina University as saying, “I would be disappointed if Christiane would become another Washington insider. Christiane could very well be the one to infuse a broader perspective.” But there is no indication that Amanpour is or ever has been anything other than a consummate insider. While she sometimes recounts her career as that of a struggling young immigrant girl made good, the reality seems to be that Amanpour has benefited from her membership in and connections to the establishment from a very early age. In one unusually candid conversation during the ultimately tragic search for John F. Kennedy, Jr., Amanpour recounted to Larry King how she had been the JFK Jr’s lifelong friend. “It began nearly twenty years ago in college,” she said. “We were college mates. I didn’t go to the same university as he did, but we shared a house off-campus, along with others of his friends who remain friends today.” No one, it seems obvious to point out, who is “college mates” with JFK Jr. can possibly be described as an outsider to the establishment.

“I get afraid,” Amanpour once told CBS’ Lesley Stahl, “when I read something and I just don’t know – is that the fact, is that the truth, is that somebody’s political bias, or somebody’s cultural bias? And that frightens me.” Ironically, Amanpour’s own biases are fairly obvious. They are the biases of the establishment to which she is loyal perhaps without even realizing it. She has been part of it for a long time, and she by and large shares its interests, its hatreds, its loyalties, its obsessions, and its prejudices. It is not her style, her interests, or her ethics, but the bubble she lives in that defines her.