(image via time)
Are Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour CNN's "Team of Rivals." If, indeed, Zakaria and Amanpour have a rivalry, then it is to the benefit of us, the viewers.
Fareed Zakaria's guest list has been muscular. The amount of intellectual firepower in the foreign policy arena on GPS includes: Hamid Gul, founder of Pakistan's ISI, George Soros, Singapore's legendary former PM Lee Hsien Loong, Queen Rania, Al Gore, Henry Kissinger, The Quartet's Middle East pointman Tony Blair, Robert Rubin, Niall Ferguson and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao -- to name a few. And the show has only been on the air since this summer!
By contrast, Christiane Amanpour's recent special on genocide ran amazing interviews with foreign policy luminaries like Peter Galbraith, author of the impossible-to-put-down "The End of Iraq," and Richard Holbrooke. Galbraith is a folk hero among the Kurds (He exposed Sadaam Hussein's Satanic al-anfar campaign), and Holbrooke among the Muslim Serbs, both inveighed mightily against the genocidal forces that reared its head at century's end. Next year Amanpour hosts a nightly show on CNN International.
On this week's show Fareed Zakaria announced that he will be hosting Colin Powell, who may or may not take a cabinet position -- or at least an important advisory role -- under Obama. While blogs are known far and wide as consisting on a diet of celebrity news and contributing snark as a digestive by-product, The Corsair would like to extend a long, formal bow to the programming geniuses at CNN, who, it seems, goes in for giving mass audiences a chance at hearing serious thinkers and former world leaders whose influence would otherwise be relegated to the cosmos of hardly-read foreign policy journals and the echo-chambers stretching across the Upper West Side-DC-Hollywood axis.
Bravo.
(Zakaria via nytimes)
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