Broadcasting from the RNC in Cleveland Wednesday night, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah brought on CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour to discuss journalistic ethics. The longtime liberal anchor, who has spent her career pushing a left-wing agenda, audaciously told Noah, that journalists shouldn’t be neutral or unbiased in their reporting. Instead, she claimed, journalists should “find the truth” and report it.
During the very brief interview, Noah asked Amanpour to clarify something that she said recently about journalistic neutrality that “really connected” with him. Amanpour explained:
AMANPOUR: Well, I've come up with a sort of a slogan right now because I'm about frustrated at all of this. So I now say truthful, not neutral. There is a difference here. Truthful is bringing the truth. Neutral can be creating a false equivalence between this side and that. (Applause) I'm really glad you agree because it is to you who I am reporting the news and I really want you to know that I go out of my way to bring you the truth. And the truth is actually there. You can find the truth. And there are facts. And there are figure and there are other things. And you can't conflate the two.
So giving equal airtime and reporting in a fair and balanced way on contentious issues, is apparently, not telling “the truth.” To add to that, apparently journalists are supposed to feed audiences a pre-approved message that reflects their own network’s values.
This was evidenced in her most recent reporting on Brexit, where Amanpour had a meltdown, telling Anderson Cooper, “A lot of the Leave movements are led by the hard-right, very, very xenophobic, anti-immigrant, very populist, nationalist, white identity politics.”
All the while CNN and Amanpour held to their elitist morality with a chyron that conveyed CNN was reporting the “truth” against the conservative party’s “myths.”
