Foreign policy reporting can be tricky. You have to explain what bad people think in an honest way without coming across like you endorse their position. Christiane Amanpour failed in this on Tuesday’s CNN News Central as she omitted key facts related to a recent ceasefire proposal that she claimed could have prevented Iran’s salvo of 180 ballistic missiles on Israel.
Amanpour recalled, “And what the Lebanese foreign minister told me, and this is really extraordinary, and I had not heard it before. That just before the Israeli targeting of the Hezbollah headquarters that assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, that there had been a ceasefire, which the U.S. announced, but what the Lebanese prime minister said to me was that they had got Hezbollah to agree to that ceasefire and apparently they thought that Netanyahu would agree too.”
The ceasefire proposal Amanpour is referring to was for a 21-day temporary ceasefire that would have allowed for negotiations towards a permanent one parallel with a similar ceasefire in Gaza. Israel opposed it because if the first stage ended in failure, all it would have accomplished was allowing Hezbollah to regroup after much of its chain of command had been wiped out and communications sabotaged.
[See NewsBusters for more]