Amanpour vs CNN [re-edit and modification, with some new update, based on the intercept investigation]

'If someone says it’s raining & another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the f**king window & find out which is true' [Mehdi Hasan. CEO ZETEO]

DC 1.55PM

Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour, Iranian - British, the renowned international news principal anchor and another CNN employees with Arab ancestry confronted network executives over what the staffers described as myriad leadership failings in coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, according to a leaked recording of a recent all-hands meeting obtained by The Intercept.

2pm DC yesterday, Christiane Amanpour aired with former high ranking State Department Josh Paul

Josh Paul

, around 80 - 85 minutes after Secretary Defense Lloyd Austin III admit [on Congress hearing] directly answer to Congressman

Representative Ro Khanna

that Israel killing more than 25,000 Palestinian women & children.

In the hourlong meeting at CNN’s London Bureau on February 13, staffers took turns questioning a panel of executives about CNN’s protocols for covering the war in Gaza and what they describe as a hostile climate for Arab reporters. Several junior and senior CNN employees described feeling devalued, embarrassed, and disgraced by CNN’s war coverage.

One of CNN with Arab ancestry, Nima Elbagir

Nima Elbagir

, a Sudanese, 2.5hours ago [around 10.49am DC] ‘liked’ the tweet appreciating her and team about investigation-reporting related to blocked aid to Gaza.

The panelists — CNN Worldwide CEO and CNN Editor-in-Chief Mark Thompson, CNN U.S. Executive Editor Virginia Moseley, and CNN International General Manager Mike McCarthy — responded with broad assurances that the employees’ concerns were being heard, while also defending CNN’s work and pointing to the persistent obstacle of gaining access inside the Gaza Strip.

Another CNN,

Oliver Darcy

, according to investigation personal by

Zei Squirrel

, wrote a piece on the NYT scandal, and twice reiterates that "there is definitely a lot of evidence for the mass rape hoax! The NYT just had to report it better!", then links back to its own and Guardian's copy-paste jobs of the same hoax the NYT fabricated. Oliver Darcy read the Intercept [good for you

Ken Klippenstein

Trigger Discipline

Daniel Boguslaw

Prem Thakker

Ryan Grim

]piece that goes over all the hoaxes, including focusing on Zaka and Shari Mendes, then just ignores it and focuses on the Gal Abdush case, and repeats his own outlet's laundering of the same NYT hoax via Jake Tapper.

Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper's Newsletter

Jake’s Substack

. Investigation by Zei of course immediately get a response by Al Jazeera

Sana Saeed

Both

Sana Saeed

and

Aaron Maté

agree the source of hoax - rape by HAMAS is ZAKA and also Stuart Seldowitz, former assistant to [former secretary of the state, the late] Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright.

means: iraq embargo, 1990 - 1995, after iraq - kuwait, August 2nd, 1990

Back to The Intercept. One issue that came up repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau. As The Intercept reported in January, the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.

“You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” said Amanpour, who was identified in the recording when an executive called her name. “So you’ve heard it, and I hear what your response is and I hope it does go a long way.”

CNN spokesperson Jonathan Hawkins declined to comment on the meeting and pointed The Intercept to the network’s previous statement about SecondEyes, which described it as a process to bring “more expert eyes” to coverage around the clock. “I would add to this that the staff members on this group include Arab staff based outside Israel, and have done since the group was established,” Hawkins said. 

Amanpour did not respond to a request for comment.

Like other mainstream news organizations, CNN has faced a flood of internal and external criticism of its coverage of Israel and Gaza since October 7, accused of minimizing Palestinian suffering and uncritically amplifying Israeli narratives. Just this week, CNN described an Israeli massacre of more than 100 starving people who were gathered to get food as a “chaotic incident.” Earlier this month, The Guardian published an extensive story sourced to multiple CNN staffers who described the network’s Gaza coverage as “journalistic malpractice.”

During the February meeting, a half-dozen staffers spoke candidly about concerns with CNN’s war coverage. They said the coverage has weakened the network’s standing in the region and has led Arab staffers, some of whom entered lethal situations to cover the war, feeling as though their lives are expendable.

“I was in southern Lebanon during October and November,” one journalist said. “And it was more distressing for me to turn on CNN, than the bombs falling nearby.”

THE MEETING BEGAN as an effort for leadership to discuss editorial priorities. Thompson, in his opening remarks, spoke at length about his vision for evenhanded journalism and reiterated his personal openness to critical exchange and inquiry. “There’s something about the essence of CNN — its brand, what it stands for — which to me is great breaking news, with, right in the middle of the frame, a human being, someone you trust and whose background you know, acting as your guide to what’s happening,” he said.

As soon as the C-suite opened the discussion up to staff questions, the interrogation began.

“My question is about our Gaza coverage,” said the journalist who worked from Lebanon in the fall. “I think it’s no secret that there is a lot of discontent about how the newsgathering process — and how it played out.”

Instead of finding solace in CNN’s coverage of the war, the staffer continued, “I find that my colleagues, my family, are platforming people over and over again, that are either calling for my death, or using very dehumanizing language against me … and people that look like me. And obviously, this has a huge impact in our credibility in the region.”

The journalist posed a question to the executives: “I want to ask as well, what have you done, and what are you doing to address the hate speech that fills our air and informed our coverage, especially in the first few months of the war?”

Thompson responded that he’s generally satisfied with how the network has covered Israel’s war on Gaza, while conceding that “it is impossible to do this kind of story where there are people with incredibly strong opinions on both sides,” without “sometimes making mistakes.” He added that CNN has gotten better at admitting mistakes and trying to correct them and suggested, in response to the staffer’s concerns over dehumanization, that holes in coverage are a consequence of limited access to Gaza.

“I think the fact that it’s been very difficult for us until relatively recently, and even today, to get fully on the ground inside Gaza, has made it hard for us to deliver the kind of individualized personal stories of what it’s been like for the people of Gaza, in the way it has been more possible for us with the story of the families of those murdered and kidnapped by Hamas in the original Hamas attack on Israel,” said Thompson, who answered most of the questions.

If the network had the same access to Gaza as it does to the families of Israeli hostages, he continued, “I believe we would have done the same,” citing a story the network ran about one of its own producers caught in Gaza. “I think that we have for the most part tried very hard to capture the … our job is not to be moral arbiters, it is to report what’s happening.”

Another newsroom staffer chimed in to object to the network’s uncritical coverage of statements by Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “I think a lot of us felt very strongly about the fact that there were very senior anchors not challenging people like, comments like, the defense minister using what is considered under international law, genocidal language, ‘human animals,’ all of those things that made up the first seven pages of the South African legal case at the ICJ,” referring to the International Court of Justice.

The employee then turned to SecondEyes: “If we want a culture that truly values diversity, we need to be really honest about, nobody gets it right. But we did not have our key Jerusalem producers on that Jerusalem SecondEyes — we didn’t have an Arab on it for some time.”

The staffer went on to say that Muslim or Arab journalists at CNN were made to feel that they must denounce Hamas to clear their names and be taken seriously as journalists. “I’ve heard this, where a number of younger colleagues now feel that they didn’t want to put their hands up to speak up even in the kind of the local Bureau meeting,” the staffer said. “People were taking their names off bylines.”

Thompson interjected, saying that people seemed to be speaking up now and that he welcomes editorial discussions.

Another staffer disputed that characterization and noted that Arab and Muslim journalists walk a difficult line between feeling proud of working for CNN while facing pressure from their families and communities over working for a network with a pronounced pro-Israel bias. 

“I think it’s very important for you to know that the degree of racism that those of us of Arab and Muslim descent face inside Israel, covering Israel, was disproportionate — the targeting of us by pro Israeli organizations, and what we had to hear,” another staffer added.

If Amanpour tired and screwed up, not a surprise if Amanpour resigned from CNN and create her platform like another Brit Mehdi Raza Hasan

Mehdi Hasan

- CEO ZETEO

Team Zeteo

.

endorsmenet by

Greg Sargent

Using words by

Mehdi Hasan

, "Far too many journalists hold back from speaking the truth because they don’t want to offend conservatives, or ‘sound biased,’ or risk losing their connections to the people in power." Mehdi told, he create ZETEO to allow him ‘To Speak Bluntly’ about the news.” Fascinating if Amanpour resigned from CNN and following a Mehdi’s step to create her platform.