Amanpour & CNN: Biased Reporting

Christiane Amanpour should be stripped of all awards she received for her reporting on the war in Bosnia. Her one-sided and often dishonest reports from Sarajevo and elsewhere are crimes against objective journalism.

In February 1994, during the Siege of Sarajevo, a massacre took place in a bread line. You probably know the story. There's an article on Wikipedia about it that puts the blame on the Serbian Army. Most other sources blame the Serbs too. While the massacre was taking place, Christiane Amanpour was sitting in a cafe in Belgrade. This didn't stop her from placing the blame on the Serbs.

The following quote is from one of Amanpour's colleagues, printed in NY Times Magazine by Stephen Kinzer in 1994:

I have winced at some of what she’s done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism. She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no journalist has. There was a lot of controversy regarding the massacre (called the Markale Massacre or the bread-line massacre). A secret UN report blamed the Muslim army for the shelling but the report was suppressed.

Deutsch Presse-Agentur (German Press Agency) reported in June 1996:

For the first time, a senior U.N. official had admitted the existence of a secret U.N. report that blames the Bosnian Moslems for the February 1994 massacre of Moslems at the Sarajevo market.

What did Amanpour do with this new information? Ignored it, of course. The Bosnian war was already over by then and she had moved on. She did her job of demonizing the Serbs and there was nothing left for her to do. According to Stella Jatras, this massacre justified the bombing of the Serbs that followed.

This incident wasn't the worst of her lies. Early in the war, Amanpour reported the murder of two "Muslim babies" on a bus that bombed by the Serbs. Video footage of the funeral was shown on CNN. The video edited out a Serbian Orthodox priest that conducted the funeral. These were not Muslim babies; they were Serbian. Amanpour never set the record straight. The same story aired on a French TV station where the priest could clearly be seen.

In a July 29th, 1998 advertisement in the Washington Times by a Vietnam veteran's group, they had this to say about Christiane Amanpour:

Now that the Sarin gas fraud has been exposed -- what about Bosnia coverage by Christiane Amanpour who fed the American people a nightly diet of slanted reports and chilling images? Her biased reporting promoted the "We Must Do Something" approach that enabled President Clinton to send American GIs to Bosnia without facing the hard questions from American taxpayers and their elected representatives: What national interests justified that decision?

Amanpour's disturbing record of deceitful reporting makes me cringe. Seeing this liar on the series finale of Gilmore Girls nearly ruined that wonderful show for me. Amanpour was Rory Gilmore's role model. How disgusting. Looking at all the awards Amanpour has received for her reporting makes me want to projectile vomit, preferably in her face.