Journalism At Its Finest

me and my husband have been obsessed with christiane amanpour for years. why? take your pic. the beauty, the brains, the deep voice with an accent that you just can't place (think Tina Turner or Madonna, but much much cooler).

we watched the iconoclasts episode which featured her and renee zellwegger for like the third time this weekend.

side note: this is really a good show only on sundance channel which takes two icons but from different worlds, puts them together, perhaps for the first time, and then film them as they get to know one another, and understand what the other one does. its like wife swap meets celebrity fit club meets inside the actor's studio.

back to the wonderful christiane. here are some interesting facts about her:

Shortly after her birth in London, her father Mohammad, an Iranian airline executive, and her British mother Patricia, moved the family to Tehran. that explains the accent i guess.

Amanpour moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her time at U.R.I. she worked in the News Department at WBRU-FM Providence. One of her college housemates was John F. Kennedy, Jr, who was attending Brown University; they remained close friends until his death in 1999. wow.

It was her coverage of the Persian Gulf War that followed Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990 that made her famous, while also taking the network to a new level of news coverage. Thereafter, she reported from the Bosnian war and many other conflict zones.

Based out of CNN's London bureau, Amanpour is one of the most recognized international correspondents on American television. Her willingness to work in dangerous conflict zones has reportedly made her one of the more highly (if not the highest) paid field reporters in the world.

She speaks English, Persian, and French fluently.

She sat down with North Korea's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan on February 26, 2008 after the New York Philharmonic visit to North Korea.

In 1998 Christiane married James Rubin who at the time was an Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the U.S. State Department.

Forbes magazine named her one of the 100 Most Powerful Women