“Be truthful, not neutral” is the adage Christiane Amanpour adopted as her journalistic philosophy while reporting on the Bosnian War in the 1990s for CNN.
After working at the network for 43 years, Amanpour announced on Oct. 19 that she will be leaving the network in June 2027.
Known for glamorously jetting into the latest conflict zones, Amanpour has become a household name, even appearing in the cult classic “Gilmore Girls” as protagonist Rory Gilmore’s career idol. Amanpour’s legacy will largely be remembered for bringing the human cost of war to American living rooms, having covered the first Gulf War, Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide, as well as conflicts between the Russians and Ukrainians, and the Israelis and Palestinians.
While her style of advocacy journalism, which she frames as a devotion to “truth,” has earned her 10 Emmys, four Peabody Awards, two Polk Awards and many more accolades, she has faced criticism over the years for taking sides in various conflicts.
The New York Times’ Stephen Kinzer said it best in an October 1994 headline: “Where there’s war, there’s Amanpour.”
His article featured several network insiders, one of whom he quoted anonymously as saying, “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.”
CAMERA’s documentation of Amanpour over the course of several decades has revealed her bias against Israelis, and affinity for the Jewish state’s adversaries.
Amanpour’s coverage has been rife with double standards and misplaced blame for Israelis, falsehoods and Holocaust inversion. Throughout her coverage, she brought boxing gloves when interviewing Israeli officials and kid gloves when interviewing Palestinian or Iranian ones. When covering Gaza, she and her guests lay the blame for Palestinian suffering entirely on Israel, ignoring Hamas’s reign of terror over its own civilians.
Her rose-colored glasses were apparent in her recent interview with Hamas official Bassem Naim in August, when he claimed that the terrorist group was “totally committed to the phase one [of the Gaza ceasefire] plan,” that they “never violated the plan” and that they have “done more than expected … regarding implementing the plan.”
She didn’t question these sweeping statements, despite the Israeli military warning of Hamas’s efforts to rebuild and the terrorist group’s foot-dragging when it came to returning the remains of the slain hostages.
Amanpour has allowed her guests to accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide without providing evidence and without rebuttal from her.
Beyond systemic editorial bias, CAMERA has documented numerous instances where Amanpour was neither neutral nor truthful when it came to Israelis, Palestinians and Iran.
Perhaps her most well-known mishap was in an April 10, 2023 broadcast, in which she fallaciously labeled the drive-by terrorist murder of two sisters and their mother—Lucy Dee, the wife of Rabbi Leo Deo, and daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 16—a “shootout,” implying the family members were fighting back when they were killed. It took her over a month to clarify on air that she had “misspoke[n]” when she called the attack a “shootout” instead of a “shooting.”
Just two months before, Amanpour appeared to fabricate poll results to falsely suggest that “the Palestinian side” wanted “a peaceful, two-state solution to co-exist with” Israelis despite recent polls of Palestinians showing low support for a two-state solution. A December 2022 poll by the Ramallah-based organization Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research even showed that a majority (55%) supported the return to an armed intifada, for example.
During Israel’s first war with Iran in June 2025, CNN had to correct Amanpour’s claim that an Iranian ballistic missile struck “near a hospital” in Beersheva since the missile had actually crashed directly into the Soroka Medical Center, destroying its surgical ward.
Back in 2013, Amanpour was responsible for mistranslating an interview with then Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in a way that entirely changed the meaning of the published story.
The headline falsely announced that Iran’s new president had acknowledged the Holocaust, even though he never used the word “Holocaust” or its Farsi equivalent during the interview.
As CAMERA’s Gilead Ini wrote at the time, Rouhani “certainly did not acknowledge Hitler’s systematic murder of 6 million Jews. He referred only to generic Nazi ‘crimes’ of questionable severity—and did so with such ambivalence that analyses in The New Republic and The Daily Beast convincingly argued the Iranian president was in fact engaged in old-fashioned Holocaust denial, albeit a more subtle version than that practiced by his outspoken predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
To this day, CNN never corrected the mistranslation or retracted the conclusions drawn from it, choosing instead to stand by Amanpour through it all, despite several translators pointing out that the translation was wrong.
