NOW WHO’S BEING NAIVE, CHRIS? Amanpour Scraps With Israel’s Regev: No One’s Questioned Hamas’s Fatality Figures!
Does journalist Christiane Amanpour truly believe the terror group Hamas is a reliable source of combat information? On the Tuesday edition of Amanpour & Co. (which runs on CNN International and later on tax-funded PBS), Amanpour talked with familiar face Mark Regev, senior adviser to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and defended the fatality tally put out by Hamas as truthful and accurate. She even ludicrously claimed Hamas’s numbers have never been questioned before.
The verbal scuffle began when Regev pointed out what should be obvious to journalists, that Hamas is holding children and infants hostage and is “not going to suddenly become humanitarians. They will only release hostages if they’re under amazing pressure.”
Amanpour inched toward condemning Israel for violating international law, citing a previous video clip mash-up she had run of world leaders suggesting Israel was in danger of violating international law.
Regev reiterated “Israel is conducting itself in the framework of international law,” and argued that Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza could actually reduce civilian casualties by allowing Israeli airstrikes to be more surgical. Then he turned to Hamas’s lack of credibility on combat figures, which Amanpour furiously defended as irrefutably true:
Flashback to October of 2020, for another example of Mencken-esque journalistic rigor from Amanpour: GOP Spokeswoman Elizabeth Harrington Absolutely Wrecks CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Over Joe Biden Scandals:
[Harrington] then pushes Amanpour further by noting that CNN ran with the unverified, Russian garbage that is the Steele Dossier.
You may recall that CNN’s Jake Tapper first dabbled in the aforementioned, now infamous, dossier, attempting to spread it via unnamed sources without revealing the true origin and its veracity. When Buzzfeed dropped the entire dossier publicly, Tapper actually got upset because he felt like they had stepped on his story. What he was really upset by was that he could no longer peddle bits and pieces of the dossier, without having to answer for the entire document. In other words, for CNN to complain about Russian misinformation, when they were a chief purveyor of Russian misinformation, is extremely rich.
Amanpour then dives headfirst in misleading, fake news by trying to bring up the FBI’s latest press conference as proof that the Biden laptop could be due to Russia. Again, there’s no evidence of that, and the press conference in question made no such mention. But as I predicted in my write-up at the time (see The FBI Throws Joe Biden a Bone), the media were always going to latch onto the vague, unrelated allegations made by the FBI earlier in the week, to muddy the waters and pretend it somehow shows Hunter Biden didn’t make millions peddling influence while paying his dad off. He did.
I figure that Amanpour didn’t think she’d get pushed back on so hard in this interview, but Harrington absolutely takes her to the woodshed, and the full clip is worth the watch. It got so bad that Amanpour gets visibly upset, starts rolling her eyes, and desperately tries to mislead about the FBI presser to change the subject. When that all happens, you know you’ve done a good job combating CNN’s nonsense for the day.
NewsBusters has a transcript of the interview, including this moment:
AMANPOUR: As you know perfectly well, I’m a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts. And there has never been any issues in terms of [Biden] corruption. Now, let me ask you this. Yesterday, the FBI —
HARRINGTON: Wait, wait, wait!
AMANPOUR: The FBI —
HARRINGTON: How do you know that?
AMANPOUR: I’m talking about reporting and any evidence. I’m talking to you now —
HARRINGTON: I would love if you guys would start doing that digging and start doing that verification.
AMANPOUR: Now, we’re not going to do your work for you. I want to ask you a question —
HARRINGTON: That’s a journalist’s job!
AMANPOUR: — contrary to what —
HARRINGTON: It’s a journalist’s job to find out if this is verified!
Sadly, that profession has been in short supply at CNN since about the mid-1990s.