Amanpour leaves ‘CNN,’ but a legacy of anti-Israel media bias remains

Christiane Amanpour will soon be gone from CNN, where she began her career in 1983. A star of its coverage of various armed conflicts for more than 30 years, she has been the cable giant’s international anchor since 2012.

Coverage of the announcement that she will leave the network in June, however, wasn’t so much the usual celebration of an honored retiree. Instead, it was used as an occasion for both Amanpour and other members of the journalism establishment to fire a shot over the bow of the new owner of CNN, billionaire David Ellison, whose Paramount Skydance company recently finalized its purchase of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

Under new ownership

Amanpour, who has spent her adult life hobnobbing with celebrities, and eventually becoming one herself, objects to Ellison. But this isn’t just the usual snobbery displayed by wealthy celebrities about even wealthier people they are forced to work for. David Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, ranked by Forbes as the eighth-richest person on Earth with a net worth estimated at $182 billion.

Her problem stems from the fact that he thinks legacy outlets like CNN are a dying paradigm and out of touch with most viewers. One of the reasons for this is that it, like the vast majority of legacy media outlets, is hopelessly biased, tilting the news from a liberal point of view to the point where increasingly few who don’t share its political prejudices bother to watch it anymore.

That’s why Ellison, who acquired CBS last year, hired Bari Weiss to try and inject some balance into that network’s biased, liberal news programs. Predictably, the staff at CBS has been outraged at Weiss’s attempts to do just that, with some resigning and others, like “60 Minutes” anchor Scott Pelley, being fired because of his clashes with her.

Amanpour has publicly criticized Weiss for trying to change CBS and clearly wanted no part of what she feared was a similar effort at “ideological realignment” at CNN. In her statement about her departure from CNN, she urged those she’s leaving behind to face Ellison and Weiss to “be truthful, not neutral.”

Rather than being an anodyne reminder of the obligations of journalists to the truth, it was a defense of something very different from the ideals of objective journalism past generations aspired to, even if they rarely lived up to them.

Amanpour, 68, is of mixed British and Iranian descent, and was raised in Britain and educated in the United States. One of the most honored broadcast journalists of her generation, she was a ubiquitous presence on the network dating back to the early 1990s. And she’s since served in a variety of prominent roles as one of the reporters on CBS’s “60 Minutes” show (1996-2005) and as the host of her own program “Amanpour & Company” on PBS (2018-present). She even served a brief stint as the anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning talking-heads show “This Week” (2010-2011).

Pre-existing prejudice

Amanpour may like to claim that she was “fiercely independent” and devoted to the facts, though that has never been true of her work. And there is no better illustration than the way she has used her influential perch to skew coverage against the State of Israel, and to depict it and its people as uniquely evil and almost always in the wrong.

Her bosses at CNN and elsewhere have not only tolerated her bias but encouraged it. Indeed, if she’s a role model for the rising generation of the press, it’s because she has practiced a form of journalism and reporting the news from her own biased perspective. From the time she first became a star during the First Gulf War to the present, Amanpour turned the skewing of stories into an art form. She always managed to make whatever she reported conform to her pre-existing ideas about the good guys to be extolled and the bad guys to be vilified.

Coverage of Israel and its ongoing battle for survival against Arab and Muslim opponents who want to destroy it demonstrated this regularly.

The list of outrageous examples of her anti-Israel bias is too long to relate here. Those who want to take a deep dive into the extensive catalogue of her journalistic malpractice can visit the CAMERA media monitoring organization’s website page devoted to her for a taste of the consistent way in which she misrepresented the truth when it came to anything about the Jewish state.

Some of the highlights include incidents such as when she said on air on Oct. 25, 2025 that the Israeli hostages held by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, who were tortured, raped and starved by the terrorists, “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” Never mind that some of the hostages were actually being abused while held captive by “average Gazans.” While she was later forced to retract that lie, it was in line with the way she and others in corporate media became stenographers for Hamas, accepting every false claim the terrorist organization made, while treating anything coming from Israel with the deepest skepticism.

In 2024, she compared Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, currently serving a life sentence for five murders, to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years until he was freed and eventually became that country’s first black president.

Her toying with the truth didn’t begin on Oct. 7.

Six months earlier, during Passover, she described a terror attack in Judea and Samaria of a Jewish family in which the wife and two daughters of Rabbi Leo Dee—Lucy Dee, and daughters Maia and Rina—who were ambushed and shot and killed while driving in their car as being a “shootout.” She apologized for this, but the instances in which she “misspoke” (most of which never generated retractions) almost always demonstrated outrageous bias against Jews.

Years before that, she provoked justified anger from the pro-Israel community for her 2007 CNN documentary series “God’s Jewish Warriors.” It depicted all Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, as well as their supporters, as mad fanatics. The series never acknowledges the Islamist extremism that defines mainstream Palestinian Arab opinion and that has impelled them to reject every attempt at compromise for a century.

Amanpour never hesitated to demonize Israelis. She also played fast and loose with Jewish history. In 2020, she compared President Donald Trump to German Nazis who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, a year before the start of World War II. Under pressure, she again apologized, though later retracted the apology.

In this, Amanpour was a forerunner for what would eventually become standard practice at liberal outlets like CNN or The New York Times. It’s an era in which a new generation of journalists considers it to be their obligation to promote their conception of woke truth, regardless of the facts, and dismiss efforts at objectivity and reporting both sides of a story as the “neutrality” she disdains.

And that’s why she fears any effort to return CNN or any other outlet to upholding honest journalism by Weiss and Ellison.

Wokeness is antithetical to journalism

Weiss is no right-winger. She is, however, an opponent of what passes for journalism in the newsrooms of the outlets that Americans on both sides of the political aisle once trusted. Her effort to rid CBS of woke activism and disregard for fairness that would mean honest reporting is deeply unpopular among its overwhelmingly left-wing staff.

Weiss was driven from the Times during the moral panic about racism during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020. A woke mob in the newsroom forced the opinion editor of the paper to resign for the crime of publishing a conservative opinion with which they disagreed. Weiss said she was harassed for being widely identified as a Jew and for being willing to speak out against antisemitism.

Since leaving the Times, her career has been on the upswing. She founded The Free Press and turned it into a major independent source of news and opinion. Her hiring by Ellison to undertake a reclamation project at CBS has turned her into a villain in the eyes of liberals. She has come under fire from leftist critics inside and outside the network as a “MAGA” activist for her attempts to get the staff to play it down the middle, rather than injecting their opinions into every story and headline. She has urged them to be as aggressive in covering the faults of those on the left as they would be with right-wingers they personally oppose.

That’s what journalists should always try to do, but for Amanpour and her woke acolytes, that represents the dreaded “neutrality” that interferes with their subjective ideas about the truth. This is particularly clear at a time when their terrible distortions of the facts in their reporting about the post-Oct. 7 war against Iran, in addition to its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies, has been a principal factor in the surge of Jew-hatred that has swept across the globe for the last three years.

We can only hope that the efforts of Weiss and her boss will be the starting point for a turning of the tide in which woke activism posing as journalism will be rejected. Still, they are fighting an uphill battle against a press corps that has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that are the engine for contemporary antisemitism.

The accolades for Amanpour’s career pouring in from fellow Israel-bashers and liberals have been numerous. Yet her legacy isn’t one of truth so much as it is one that demonstrates exactly why the media establishment is ignored by so many who are tired of their brand of bias. Wokeness is antithetical to journalism. Her skewed coverage of Israel actively contributed to the rising tide of bigotry and even violence against Jews. But what made her particularly insufferable was her pretense of being devoted to the ideals of journalism while being so brazenly biased.

Amanpour’s awards and celebrity status may have ensured that she wouldn’t be held accountable throughout her career. But if journalism is to be saved, then it can only be via the efforts of truly independent reformers like Weiss, who must not flinch from cleaning house at CBS and CNN.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.