CNN is airing a special called "Scream Bloody Murder" on Thursday night, and Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales previewed it Thursday morning as powerful, even as he suggested the show's host, foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, is too blatantly patting herself on the back:
CNN is celebrating 25 years of reports by star reporter Amanpour, although to attach a documentary on genocide to anything resembling a "celebration" is not very good form. Nor is it encouraging to hear Amanpour implicitly praising herself and her own courage when dealing with genocide of recent years: "Day after day, I reported the story," she says of one crisis -- and later, she notes of the shelling of Sarajevo, "I was there, reporting on the scene."
Amanpour is the heroine of the special, and the politicians who allowed genocide to occur are the villains. Don't wait for CNN to consider that if politicians can be blamed for letting it happen, so can journalists, can't they? Shales explains:
Amanpour takes George Herbert Walker Bush and his administration to task for failing to intercede when Saddam Hussein rained terror down on Iraq's own citizens, the Kurds, in the late 1980s. Bush later turned the proverbial blind eye to mass murder in Bosnia, Amanpour says, with the president growling at a news conference that "we are not going to get bogged down in some guerrilla warfare."
Although Bush ignored the slaughter of the Kurds, he grabbed a saber and began rattling it when Saddam invaded Kuwait -- and thus threatened the flow of oil and wealth out of the Mideast. Now that was going too far! Oil-rich Kuwait plucked at Bush's heartstrings as the dying Kurds had not: "We're dealing with Hitler revisited," he declared, adding one of his trademark threats, "This will not stand."
This is one of the great conveniences of belonging to the news media: you can knock a president for inaction, and then knock him again when he acts. You can whack him coming, and whack him going, and no one seems to suggest the media's more wildly inconsistent than most politicians.
Obviously, to the many nations of the world which joined the Bush coalition against Saddam when he invaded Kuwait, the primary principle involved was not oil or wealth, but the notion of invading a country and declaring your newest province. Shales then proclaimed Bill Clinton was also lamented for failures:
But Amanpour is just as hard on Bill Clinton for his response to Rwanda when the military was found to have murdered "hundreds of thousands" of men, women and children there. The Clinton administration's policy was "a failure," Amanpour says, and she includes a scene from a Clinton news conference in which he treats one of her accusations snidely: "There have been no 'constant flip-flops,' Madame," he huffs. His indignation seems false and hollow now.
Shales is mistaken: the "constant flip-flops" line was in response to an Amanpour question in 1994 on Bosnia, not Rwanda.
Shales makes no reference to Amanpour later marrying Clinton's State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin in 1998, making her look like a walking conflict of interest.
