When ABC News announced recently that they were hiring Christiane Amanpour to front This Week most sane, intelligent people thought this was a good idea. She has a degree in journalism, traveled throughout most of the world, met with a fair number of international leaders, and covered some of the most challenging stories of the last decade with fairness and accuracy.
There was a sense that perhaps ABC was treating the news like a serious business again, as opposed to an extension of their entertainment division. One could make the argument that Amanpour has little experience covering domestic politics, the focus of This Week, but I do not think anyone could doubt with her experience and expertise that she would quickly develop the necessary skills.
Of course, as I am repeatedly reminded, most major newspapers suffer from a dearth of sane, intelligent people in their opinion sections. The Washington Post, which has created a welfare state for former Bush speechwriters, ran a screed by Tom Shales against the selection of Amanpour.
Shales writes in the Style Columns as a TV critic, which gives him the same information level and tin-ear to foreign and domestic policy as most Bush speechwriters. By dint of his extended research about the show Saturday Night Live, Shales believes he is qualified to assert that Amanpour’s background of being half-Iranian makes her anti-Israel. He cites, in support of his argument, a Facebook group that has 60 members.
Fortunately, the ever incisive Glenn Greenwald quickly attacked Shales on the merits of the argument. I think Greenwald stops short of following Shales argument to its logical conclusion, although he hints at it. If you take Shales’ argument and reverse it he is essentially saying you cannot trust any Jew on television. Wolf Blitzer lobbied on behalf of a foreign government and Jeffrey Goldberg served in the army of a foreign state.
It is amazing that Shales seems to be making both a pro-Israel argument and an anti-Semitic one in the same breath. Perhaps Shales is an Apocalyptic Christian who believes in Israel for the return of Jesus, but not in the value of Jews. I know nothing of Shales’ religious or political beliefs, I can only judge him by what he says. Amanpour has no such ambiguous statements on her record. To me, it says that we cannot trust Shales to tell us about TV. He has biases, and we just do not know what they are.
Alex Pareene at Gawker hints at the larger issue at play, which is xenophobia. Pareene talks about the gendered component to Shales’ later criticisms of Amanpour, including the color of her hair. As an aside, being in NY, which represents most real Americans, I have never seen that many blonde people on our news programs. It’s just not who we are as a nation, but I suppose it is possible Shales’ does fetishize the Aryan ideal.
There is a growing tide of xenophobia in popular culture. In the last Presidential election cycle, approximately 12% of the country thought that President Obama was Muslim. According to a recent survey, that number has now increased to 32%. I have argued elsewhere that using the term “Muslim” is the new way to call someone “nigger.”
It’s a way to emphasize racial otherness and, because it draws on the same poisoned well as anti-Semitism, uses many of the same stock mechanisms for marginalizing people. Shales’ piece is full of dog-whistles that talk about how “other” Amanpour is and that she’s a crypto-Muslim. He emphasizes her Iranian background and that she’s anti-Israel; the mention of the color of her hair is just icing on the cake. In contemporary parlance, anti-Israel equates to terrorist sympathizer. These charges are also being hurled at President Obama and VP Biden.
Shales’ opinion of Amanpour is based on the rhetoric of racial and religious purity. It treats Israel as separate from Israelis, who are Jewish. By splashing in the muddy waters of hate, no matter how coded, he not only attacks Muslims but makes the positions of Jews in America more precarious. Of course, the irony is that if Amanpour follows any faith, is most likely Christianity, judging by the “Christian” in her name, and she is married to a Jewish man by the name of James Rubin.
