Starting off as an entry-level desk assistant and working her way up to becoming CNN’s Chief International Correspondent and having her own show, Christiane Amanpour is this week’s Queen Sheva for proving that determination and passion (and perhaps a little bit of wit) can overcome any obstacle in the way .
Christiane Amanpour was born in London in 1958 to a British mother and an Iranian father. She was raised mostly in Tehran, Iran, but attended boarding school in England. Her interest in journalism came after the 1979 Iranian Revolution where the toppling of the Pahlavi regime sent her entire family into exile. As a result, she decided to attend the University of Rhode Island in order to study journalism and graduated summa cum laude while working at a local news station.
Amanpour joined CNN in 1983 as an assistant in Atlanta, Georgia, and was initially discouraged after the news channel refused to put her on air due to her dark color and stark accent. Her boss even told her that she would never be successful, yet Amanpour began to take jobs that no one wanted in order to prove just how talented she really was. Slowly, CNN realized that Amanpour was too brilliant to not give her a better position and ultimately made her a temporary on-air correspondent at the New York offices. Her first big break came from reporting on the Iran-Iraq War, which won CNN the first DuPont award for her four-week series “Iran: In the Name of God”.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the sweeping changes taking place in Europe, Amanpour was relocated to Frankfurt and began covering the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent conflict in Georgia. She then covered the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, the AIDS epidemic, the rise of Osama Bin Laden and several other large-scale conflicts all around the world between 1992 and 2009. Despite being criticized for a lack of objectivity in some of these reports, Amanpour believed that being a journalist also entailed delivering a sense of justice for the many war victims she encountered.
Christiane Amanpour now has her own show on CNN as of 2009 and was also named the channel’s Chief International Correspondent (her first boss is probably facepalming himself right now). She has more than 280 million viewers and has received a wide array of journalistic awards, including several Peabody’s and nine Emmys! She is happily married and has one son, and continues to report on the most important topics of today’s world. Perhaps Drake’s lyrics “started from the bottom, now we hea” were written with this incredible journalist in mind.
Check out Christiane Amanpour’s video on her “First Big Break”.
