REPORTING THE WORLD
BY CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
I started at CNN 22 years ago, with no experience but a huge amount of drive and determination.I wanted to see the world and report on its dramatic events. I grew up with CNN and was there for many of its groundbreaking, brand-making triumphs.

The Gulf war thrust CNN into the media stratosphere. We who worked there understood and appreciated the media revolution that Ted Turner was creating. We believed that we were on the cutting edge of broadcasting history. For the first time ever not only had a 24-hour television news channel been created, but when Ted took CNN global, that too was an exhilarating first for television.

During the first Gulf War there was almost as much buzz about CNN as about the war. Leaders, both allies and enemies, found themselves talking to each other over our network, reporters found themselves telling stories from all fronts, live and around the clock. The first sound and pictures of bombing of Baghdad in 1991 electrified the world and those images remain seared in our collective consciousness and defined a whole era of news coverage.

CNN set the standard that others have spent the intervening years copying. I remember then, as a junior reporter, not getting the plum assignment: Baghdad. I was sent to Saudi Arabia, where there was much commentary in the local press about CNN sending an all-girl team to the famously male-oriented Kingdom. For not only was I the reporter, but our camera crew was also all-female.
It paid off too. Far from being limited by our gender, we actually got some good scoops like the first pictures of Saddam’s tanks at the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. That happened because a prince took a shine to us girls and drove us in his personal fleet of cars past all the security and soldiers who had been instructed to send journalists back! The look on our much more experienced male-colleagues back at base, was a real sight!

Back then the equipment needed to broadcast live was huge and cumbersome and expensive to move around. In the intervening years it has shrunk to the size of a laptop computer, so now we can go literally to any corner of the earth, any remote mountain top, rain forest or Tsunami-ravaged coastline, and broadcast live at will. Travelling with wonderful CNN colleagues all over the Balkans, Africa, Middle East and points beyond, I realise what a unique operation this is.

At CNN I have witnessed most of the epoch making events of the end of the 20th Century and the dangerous new world that the 21st century has ushered in. Although we were the only twenty four hour news network, there is much more competition now, and yet after 25 years, CNN still is one of the most recognized brand names in the world. Its chunky bright red logo is the eternal symbol of excellence, credibility, truth and trust. We plan to keep it that way for the next 25 years!