Does CNN's Christiane Amanpour deserve the Lowell Thomas Award?

March 12, 2009 | Stella L. Jatras

[mkjessup]

Christiane Amanforsure deserves the Lowell Thomas award for her ‘reporting’ (translation=anti American propaganda) like Saddam Hussein deserves a posthumous award for his devoted work in behalf of human rights in Iraq.

[vbmoneyspender]

I am pretty sure the NY Times already awarded her the much more prestigious Walter Duranty award.

[TommyDale]

Didn’t she cover the “Baby Milk Factory” bombing?

[MHGinTN]

I think that was another CNN fool.

[TommyDale]

"Didn't she cover the "Baby Milk Factory" bombing?"

Oh, that was her fellow CNN comrade reporter Peter Arnett.

[MHGinTN]

Peter Arnett, close friend to Saddam and company, as per CNN directive to shmooz the evil for the exclusive rights to the stories, truth be damned.

[TommyDale]

Both Christiane Amanpour and Peter Arnett were Saddam Hussein bootlickers.

[MHGinTN]

Beat me by ‘that much’ ... LOL

[Ravnagora]

vbmoneyspender said:

I am pretty sure the NY Times already awarded her the much more prestigious Walter Duranty award.

Being ignorant of who 'Walter Duranty' was/is, I looked him up and now appreciate your posting!

Source:

http://www.zimbio.com/New+York+Philharmonic/articles/9/Introducing+Walter+Duranty+Awards+Aiding+Tyrany

1932, Josef Stalin presided over one of the worst man made famines in world history. During the years 1932-1933, Ukrainian peasants, who were instrumental in making Ukraine the "breadbasket of Europe" were forced into a network of collective farms. They were completely stripped of all personal property, from agricultural implements to jewelry. They were left with no cushion against the displacement that would have occurred even during a well planned and consensual transition to collective farming.

The forced collectivisations were neither well planned nor consensual. They were strongly opposed by the Ukrainian farmers whose way of life was brutally disrupted. Anyone who attempted to hide personal property was liable to execution. The term for landed peasant "kulak", became a derisive epithet of the Stalinist regime to be hurled at the opponents of the new order. Deaths in this man made disaster were estimated to be between 2.5 and three million dead, with some estimates ranging far higher.

All this could have been expected to raise an international outcry. Fortunately for Stalin, and unfortunately for the people of Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. Notoriously well fed by his Soviet hosts, Duranty filed glowing reports of the success of the collectivisation campaign. He was dismissive of reports of starvation that were far too widespread to ignore. Whether it was the opulence of his working conditions or twisted idealism, his reportage was a valuable instrument in the service of Stalin's regime. Indeed , he was widely criticised for being a mouthpiece for the Soviet Regime, even defending their show trials of alleged enemies of the state.

Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his Soviet reporting and The New York Times allegedly not only refused to return it, but still has the award on display.

____________________________

[Savage Beast]

You don’t suppose she could be... Nah, I’m sure she’s not old enough. I just couldn’t help wondering if maybe George Bernard Shaw had somehow relented and agreed to have a child with Isadora Duncan.

[Ravnagora]

In the interest of "Fairness", here is The New York Times Company statement on the Duranty and the Pulitzer Prize issue:

http://www.nytco.com/company/awards/statement.html

New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty

Duranty, one of the most famous correspondents of his day, won the prize for 13 articles written in 1931 analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin. Times correspondents and others have since largely discredited his coverage.

Duranty's cabled dispatches had to pass Soviet censorship, and Stalin's propaganda machine was powerful and omnipresent. Duranty's analyses relied on official sources as his primary source of information, accounting for the most significant flaw in his coverage - his consistent underestimation of Stalin's brutality.

Describing the Communist plan to "liquidate" the five million kulaks, relatively well-off farmers opposed to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Duranty wrote in 1931, for example: "Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not - they must be 'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass."

Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time. Duranty's prize-winning articles quoted not a single one - only Stalin, who forced farmers all over the Soviet Union into collective farms and sent those who resisted to concentration camps. Collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket, in 1932 and 1933 - two years after Duranty won his prize.

Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers' reports that people were starving. "Conditions are bad, but there is no famine," he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the "mess" of collectivization. "But - to put it brutally - you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Some of Duranty's editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but The Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941. Since the 1980's, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to cancel Duranty's prize and The Times to return it, mainly on the ground of his later failure to report the famine.

The Pulitzer board has twice declined to withdraw the award, most recently in November 2003, finding "no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception" in the 1931 reporting that won the prize (see Pulitzer Board statement), and The Times does not have the award in its possession.

______________

[Let's Roll]

None of these awards starting with the Nobel Peace Prize given to arafart, goron and jimmah mean anything anymore.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

I thought she was EU.

Well, then...even MORE deserving!

[vbmoneyspender]

good for you.

By the way - I love this part

Duranty's cabled dispatches had to pass Soviet censorship, and Stalin's propaganda machine was powerful and omnipresent.

which poses a question - has the NY Times, or any MSM outlet for that matter, EVER put a disclaimer on reports coming from hostile dictatorships that the reports are subject to censorship. To ask the question is to answer it.

[Bokababe]

Christiane Amanpour

Interesting Personal Notes : While attending University of Rhode Island, she became friends and shared an off-campus house with Brown University student John F. Kennedy, Jr. They remained close friends until his 1999 death..... She was named 1997 Iranian Woman of the Year.

[Ravnagora]

What do you think about the recent developments in some kind of Serbian/Iranian “relationship”?

I’m a little disturbed by it, to be honest. Unfortunately, the “democratic” Allies that Serbia has been so loyal to have really let her down.

[Bokababe]

This came up on another thread and this is my opinion:

1. The Serbs are no great "friends to Iran". In fact, Iran supplied the arms to the Bosnian Muslims for use AGAINST the Serbs in Bosnia -- with Croat help and Clinton's consent, while the arms embargo was supposed to be going on.

2. The Bosnian Muslims ARE very tight with Iran and not just in trading with them. They are culturally and religiously intertwined.

3. Now Albania is inviting Iran to invest in Albania & Kosovo

It isn't a big leap to guess that Serbia is establishing trade with Iran as a strategy to try and balance that threat surrounding them, especially since Serbia is the only one who actually produces something that Iran wants.

Plus, Boris Tadic is McCain's boy -- the first graduate of the IRI to become a country's president. Nothing is happening there that McCain and the IRI doesn't want to have happen, so who knows what the game plan is in the IRI.

[Honorary Serb]

Does CNN's Christiane Amanpour deserve the Lowell Thomas Award?

NO.

[Bokababe]

And by the way, here is the IRI chart on Serbia:

If anyone thinks that they aren't sitting in DC figuring out how to manipulate those "issues of importance" like poking amoebas in a petri dish, then they don't understand politics. Ratchet up "unemployment" on them and "concern for Kosovo" goes down. Push here, and they react there. It's textbook manipulation.

And now they have gotten so good at doing this to other people in the world, they are doing it to us here in the America.

And this is just one NGO, there is also the Democrat counterpart NDI, plus Soros' NGO and many others.

NGO's should be seen for what they are -- lobbying organizations of individuals, not "objective" outside organizations.

[Bokababe]

Sorry, I posted the above comment to the wrong thread!

BB