LESLEY: Right. But of course, our life path is our life path.

CHRISTIANE: Yes.

LESLEY: That brings me back to Iran, because I wonder – this is always asked of me as a reporter – what are your biases? What are your opinions? How hard is it for you to cover anything in Iran, given your own family background?

CHRISTIANE: I understand people asking that question, but I always reject it. I really … I ask people just to look at my body of work. And nobody knows my biases. Do they think I’m against? Do they think I’m for? They don’t know my biases. They don’t know where I come from in this. I just try very hard to report the facts and to tell the stories as best as I can. I am not part of the current crop of opinion journalists or commentary journalists or feelings journalists. I strongly believe that I have to remain in the realm of fact, and from there delve deeper into a society. And I will say one thing very clearly: The lack of information about Iran, in the United States especially but also in the rest of the world, in a way makes my job … it’s sort of like an open well to plumb because anything I say, you know at least increases people’s awareness of what’s going on. And I think the one thing that I have really tried to do over the last now 19 years of covering Iran as a reporter, is try to go beyond the inevitable cliché and the stereotype, which is found strongest in the United States, because the U.S. bases its relationship and its knowledge about Iran on 30 years ago, and has very little impartial reporting to go on. And that’s what I try. But you look right now, if you just look at the television screens right now, all the so-called experts on Iran, 99 percent, are exiles based in the United States, have their own experience, their own history and their own agenda. And so that makes it very difficult for anybody to get a really clear view of what’s going on. That’s what I believe.

LESLEY: Well, let me ask you then about the state… of where objective journalism is heading.

CHRISTIANE: Yes.

LESLEY: I come out of the same background that you do. I always – I guess the right word is to say, sat on my own opinions because we do have our opinions, you can’t deny that. But I tried as hard as I could to overcome them and to be as impartial a reporter as possible. But I find as I look out on television, and even in my reading, that there’s less and less a market for that kind of reporting. The future seems to be with people who slant their stories. Even my own child, whom I put in that younger generation, says she hates reporting that doesn’t tell her where the correspondent is coming from. And I think she’s representative.

CHRISTIANE: She may be, and she’s obviously reacting to something that’s growing like wildflower now in our business. But the thing is, I get afraid when I read something and I just don’t know – is that the fact, is that the truth, is that somebody’s political bias, or somebody’s cultural bias? And that frightens me. Of course there’s a major role for opinion commentary and there has been since time immemorial. But I strongly think that unless we are able to present people with the objective facts of what’s going on, how are they meant to know what is going on? For instance, right now in Iran I’m telling you with confidence that nobody knows what’s going on there, really, because when you’re just getting Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, amateur videos – and no explanation, no reporting – you just don’t know what’s going on. It’s speculation, it’s guesswork, it’s patchwork.