Three thoughts on Christiane Amanpour

There’s a lot of blog-o-buzz about Christiane Amanpour’s new job, anchoring ABC’s this week, and the slam she got Tuesday morning by veteran Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales.

Some commenters are baffled by Shales’ slam, others say it’s all about Israel, and he does hint that is a factor:

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And even though Amanpour has often been touted for her expertise on foreign affairs, she has vocal and passionate critics in that arena as well. Supporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies. A Web site devoted to criticism of Amanpour is titled, with less than a modicum of subtlety, "Christiane Amanpour’s Outright Bias Against Israel Must Stop," available via Facebook.

In Washington Post’s live chat, though, it seems evident that his overriding issue with Amanpour is that she just plain bugs him — not fair, perhaps, but a posture consistent with Shales’ carefully cultivated reputation for crankiness:

I think Christiane is one of the most over-rated and hyped personalities of our day. There’s a reason that 60 Minutes didn’t pick up her contract; she disappointed them. Anyway c’est la vie

Further on he even kvetches about her big hair.

His most substantive point is that the Sunday talkfest is all about the Beltway, and she don’t know bupkis about Beltway.

In a way, Amanpour, scheduled to leave CNN after 18 years of international coverage and take over the program in August, could be seen as the opposite of the perfect candidate. "This Week" deals mainly in domestic politics and inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to deficient. Consider: Whenever CNN has thrown one of its big election-night, convention, or presidential debate spectaculars, drafting nearly every living staff member to appear, Amanpour has had a conspicuously low profile.

For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:

1) The counter critics are right: Sunday’s wasteland could use a little less Beltway. And Amanpour has encyclopedic knowledge about the world around us. She is also brave — I know reporters who have traveled with her and she is unflinching. She’s taken on Ahmadinejad in Tehran.

2) She’s smart, insightful — but not above skewing a story manichaean. For all her subtlety, she don’t like subtlety.

The most egregious example for our community was the Jewish chapter of the 2008 CNN series, "God’s Warriors." The only explicitly religious people she interviewed were ultranationalist settlers. The good guys are secular — even pork eaters. One of her most eloquent anti-settlement analysts, Gershom Gorenberg, is, in fact, religious — but most of the way through the hour (I’m watching it as I write)* we have yet to learn this. We have yet to meet any explicitly Orthodox — or even religious — Jew who is not a hypernationalist.

Most insidiously, she intercuts imagery of the most innocent of practices — davening, laying tefillin — with narrative pressing forward her thesis of a dangerous messianism. This may make sense in situ, when she shows settlers praying in their settlements — but many of the shots are simply religion without context. But with lots of ominous music.

This is bigotry. Religion does not necessarily inform nationalism; the most outspoken opponent of the settlements, Yeshayahu Leiboowitz, was not only Orthodox — he framed his opposition through his faith.

She also buys wholecloth the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis of the lobby; Morrie Amitay tries to talk sense, but her editing undercuts his every last effort.  "The success of the pro-Israel community is the fact that they have good arguments on their side," he says, and she cuts to combat planes and scary looking Jews in prayer shawls. "Arguments," prounceth she, "and political clout that have kept foreign aid flowing while religious settlers count their blessings."

(And, no, George H. W. Bush was not the first president to threaten to pull loan guarantees; that started with Eisenhower.)

And God help me, there’s Charles Percy, still whining about his loss of the Illinois Senate seat in some neolithic age, but we don’t get to hear about the staying power of equally as strident Israel critics like Fritz Hollings and Jim Moran.

Does she believe this stuff? Is she just another newsperson who prefers sex to substance? Does it matter? The issue with the Sunday talk desert is the perpetuation of specious conventional wisdoms — should we care if these emerge from within or without the Beltway?

3) Much as I admired her toughness, it has a flip side — arrogance. What finally turned me off Amanpour was not anything that had to do with Israel; it was this moment when she made fun of John McCain — insistently made fun of him — for stumbling during the presidential debates over his pronunciation of Ahmadinejad.

(H/T: Newsbusters.)

Really? We want a Sunday talk show host who giggles at how other people talk? A Joan Rivers with a degree?

*I’ve watched the whole thing. You can too, it starts here. Not a single normative religious Jew.

But, yes, the inevitable cheese shot of Michelangelo’s David. Jewish. A warrior. God’s Jewish warrior.

And hot.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan take Shales to task, not without reason, for taking Amanpour to task based on little of substance. (I think Shales has one substantive point — about Amanpour not having Beltway chops — and, as I note above, I think his point misses the point.)

But: My post does go into detail, agree or disagree with my analysis. I’ll make sure Sullivan and Greenwald are made aware of it. I’ll also predict they won’t link.