Christiane Amanpour
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2016
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist and broadcaster Christiane Amanpour. Her career as a reporter was forged in some of the world's most hostile environments from Bosnia to Rwanda and Iraq to Israel. From the early '90s onwards she was so ubiquitous on screen that her peers in the press pack coined the darkly comic phrase "where there's a war, there's Amanpour."
Born to an Iranian father and a British mother, she initially wanted to be a doctor, but the Revolution in Iran in 1979 galvanised her political consciousness and she turned to journalism. Her first major assignment was in Saudi Arabia where she covered the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. She describes her time in Bosnia as a life-changing experience which made her determined to tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in the chaos of conflict.
During her career she has interviewed some of the biggest names on the world stage from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to Robert Mugabe and Colonel Gaddafi. The winner of 11 Emmy Awards, she now anchors her own nightly television show on CNN although she can be whisked away at a moment's notice to cover major disasters around the globe. She has borne witness to some of history's worst atrocities but what gets her through is her eternal optimism and the courage and dignity of humanity.
Producer: Paula McGinley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My cast away this week is the broadcaster Christiane Amanpur. |
| 0:37.0 | She has made her name reporting from some of the most dangerous places in the world, |
| 0:42.0 | from Bosnia to Rwanda and most places in between. |
| 0:45.0 | She has borne witness to the very worst that humanity suffers, |
| 0:49.0 | as well as analyzing the often labyrinthine complexities of the world's geopolitical landscape. |
| 0:55.0 | From the early 90s onwards, she was so ubiquitous on screen that her peers in the press pack coined the darkly comic phrase, |
| 1:02.0 | where there's a war, there's Amunpur. |
| 1:05.0 | Born to an Iranian father and a British mother, she cites the turmoil of the revolution in Iran |
| 1:10.3 | as the event that galvanized her political consciousness it has served her well. |
| 1:14.8 | So far she's won 11 Emmys and at the last count 69 world leaders follow her on Twitter. |
| 1:22.0 | These days she's pretty much traded the grit and shrapnel of the |
| 1:24.9 | front line for the relative calm of a live TV studio hosting an eponymous nightly |
| 1:29.6 | show on CNN. She says, do you know what the greatest high in the world is? There's no greater high |
| 1:36.2 | than having survived. It's the biggest shot of adrenaline there is. So welcome, Christiane. |
| 1:41.9 | As you came in today, there was a palpable change in the balance of the room. |
| 1:46.3 | There is a kind of whirlwind property about you. Are you somebody who's sort of always just slightly adrenalized? |
| 1:54.0 | Yes, I think that is actually correct. |
| 1:57.0 | I do though take great exception and affront to the notion that war correspondence is somehow war junkies or adrenaline junkies. |
| 2:04.8 | I do though believe that you have to have that kind of adrenaline, that kind of curiosity |
... |
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