Tom Shales’ Disgusting Review Of Christiane Amanpour’s Debut Performance On “This Week”

By Yashwanth Manjunath

When Christiane Amanpour was selected by ABC News in March to replace George Stephanopoulos on their Sunday talk show “This Week,” Tom Shales of the Washington Post wrote a scathing criticism about the choice.  Shales first mentioned Amanpour’s supposed anti-Israel bias, citing a Facebook group dedicated to criticizing Amanpour for her Israeli coverage. We all know how reliable Facebook groups are as sources of information, don’t we? Shales then noted that Amanpour grew up in Iran for some time before fleeing to Great Britain during the Iranian Revolution, as if it has any relevance to her journalistic integrity.

Shales then suggested that Amanpour may have a “liberal bias” because she has been attacked by NewsBusters, as if anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh has not been attacked by NewsBusters for having a liberal bias. Finally, Shales came full circle with his review of her debut yesterday with his racialist attitude towards her hiring.

Most of Shales’s review was benign enough and not entirely unfair, although he did sophomorically refer to Amanpour as the “Grand Duchess” and as a “globe trotting Fancy Pants.”  However, it was when Shales criticized Amanpour’s  “In Memoriam” segment of the show where he lost all credibility and turned a sub-par review into a disgusting character assassination. According to Shales:

Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable “In Memoriam” segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of “all of those who died in war” in that period. Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

In his at best rash-minded stupidity and at worst racist hatred, Shales neglects the possibility Amanpour was just talking about the thousands of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as a result of the war, in addition to the lives of our own troops; or, that Amanpour was referring to the deaths of the troops our allies continue to supply us with in our war effort. Either way, perhaps Tom Shales should look in the mirror before unfairly attacking the journalistic integrity of someone who he practically called a Taliban sympathizer.

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