Over the last eight years we have witnessed the slow elimination of world news from American television. International bureaus have been closed, reporters and photographers let go or reassigned...even the Daily Show does more "on location" pieces from foreign lands than any of the cable channels, and I'm not sure all of those are really "on location"!
This seems preposterous given the increasingly global nature of our existence, but in Bush's America the preposterous became commonplace, and so we tend to get used to some really ridiculous results. To this Kossack it seemed to fit with the overall Bushian attitude that "the rest of the world doesn't matter." Well, those days are gone, and now, it seems, the rest of the world may now start to return to American television.
Christiane Amanpour just got her own show on CNN International. Nightly. Weekends on CNN for the rest of us. And the focus will be international news. It's not a huge deal, but it's a start in the right direction.
I'm a big fan of Christiane. I agree with the Times, which said:
"A serious, occasionally fierce defender of the place of international reporting in an American television news diet, Ms. Amanpour has over the years, often while accepting honors for her work, made public, pointed barbs at her own bosses, when she thought entertainment fluff threatened to overwhelm more substantive topics. But these days, she says, she’s "hopeful that we’re up to the task."
The connection between her new show and the work we all did here to get Barack elected was not lost on her either:
"The American people," she said, "spoke loudly. The majority of the American people in the run-up to this election said they believe that the next president, one of his most important priorities should be restoring America’s position in the world. That to me says it all: That means that there is an openness, that there is a desire, a hunger to know about the world, and to know about where America is and fits into the world."
Her documentary "God's Warriors" was one of the few MSM pieces that accurately traced McCain's romancing of the radical religious right. She is a committed secularist and democrat, and I think we're in for a lot more of her incisive analysis and broad, international vision.
Updated (thanks to MTmofo)