Mr Clancy, how did you get into CNN?
I was working in local television in San Francisco and I wasn’t very happy. And I had an offer from CNN and I left the ABC Station. I came to CNN six months after it started. I was offered a job earlier but I was under a contract with the station, so I couldn’t go. But they let me go eventually and I went straight to Atlanta and I was on the air in three days. And I have been there going on 29 years. It’s a long time anywhere, especially in America. I had a choice in 1982. I had been sent to Beirut and I had a choice when I came back.

I was one of the first National Correspondent and they said: “We can get you into the political unit, work in Washington, cover the campaign of Ronald Reagan.” But I said no, I’d rather work in the national desk. And so I went back to Beirut, became the bureau chief. From Beirut, we came back, I was in the US for a couple of months and then I opened the Frankfurt bureau. And from the Frankfurt bureau, I went to the Rome bureau. I spent five years in Rome.

Then I went to the London bureau. All these years, like when I was in Rome, we were covering the Baltic and the collapse of communism in 1989. And then when I was in London, I did lots and lots of Africa. I had done a little bit of Africa but that was when I really did a lot of Africa.

What does a bureau chief do?
The expenses. You never want to be the bureau chief. Be the correspondent. He gets the fun part. He gets to do the travelling and the corresponding. The bureau chief may have a better title but he doesn’t make as much money. And he has to do all the expense accounting. You don’t want that job. It’s not journalism. It’s accounting.

How true is the claim that CNN is a projection of American propaganda to some extent?
Well, we try not to be. We talk a lot about the United States and we take a feedback from other people. We always ask ourselves: Do they want to hear about what is going on in their neighbourhood? In other words, more news about Nigeria, more news about Africa? Or do they want to hear what is going on in the United States?

What is your impression of President Bush and President Obama?
They are very different Presidents. In the view of some, and my own views are irrelevant, really. I am a journalist, but I can tell you there are strong opinions, particularly about President Bush. There was a lot of fear mongering after September 11. Be very afraid. They are coming to get you. And as a result of that, the United States surrendered not only some of its own freedom at home, but some of its own values as a democracy, as a beacon, we hope, for the rest of the world. And President Obama with his latest speech to the Muslim world which we heard in Cairo and other visits has really made it clear that he wants to reverse that course. So he has a lot of popular support.

At the same time he has very vociferous, a very strong opposition at home among the people who support President Bush. Among people who supported Vice President Dick Cheney, that he is putting the country at risk. And that some freedoms have to be sacrificed in the name of security. So there is that debate. We all know how the Bush era ended. His presidency ended with some of the lowest approval ratings that the US president has ever got. We can’t judge how Barack Obama is going to do, because he is only 130 days into his government. You don’t measure 130 days. You measure after four years. Sometimes as journalists we are always eager to have the answer.

We don’t have an answer yet. We have a projection. You have a sense. I have a sense that everybody in Africa believes Barack Obama is the greatest thing since Jesus came. And there are many Americans that feel the same way. I think Obama does offer the opportunity for change. I think he is facing a huge challenge with this economic crisis, with budget deficit he is taking on. I wonder as he takes on deficits and he needs China to buy the treasury bonds in order to finance those deficits, whether he would stand up for human rights as strongly with China as he would otherwise.

Have you interviewed President Obama?
No, I would love to. If he is listening, “Obama, give me the interview!”

Do you think the us media did a fair job of covering the iraq war? And how do you see journalists embedded to cover the war?
Overall, I would say yes, it did a fair job. I think that too many people at the outset were really looking at it as if this was going to be easy. That was what everybody had been told. They were looking at it like Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and we are going to find them. It was only later that we realized that Ahmed Chalabi who was one of the Pentagon’s favourite boys was supplying all of the fraudulent information of weapons of mass destruction. I talked to him but there were some journalists who literally lived in his compound because they thought they were going to get the best story out of it. Being embedded with US troops tells the story from their perspective as long as you are open and you say: yes, that’s what I am, and these are the restrictions that have been placed upon me.

I think you are doing your best effort to remain secure, keep your team secure but at the same time, let the audience know. Be transparent. If you are with them, tell them: “This is an embedded reporter.” And whenever that happened in Iraq, CNN would say: “This is an embedded reporter.”

Looking at the recent American election, there was like a concerted effort about the American media to support Obama. CNN in particular was pro-Obama. How do you respond to that?
You know what? In general, the news media was in the tank of Barack Obama. For many reasons. Historical reasons. He was a black man. And people said: This would be a breakthrough. We never thought we would see it in our lifetimes. We didn’t think we would see it. The news media like a good story. Al Gore wasn’t all that loved by the media because he was terribly boring to cover. He may be an educated, interesting man, and he is. But he is boring to cover. Whereas Barack Obama was very exciting to cover.

What is a good story?
A good story? As I say, you shatter the history books. You elect a black President. And I think that a lot of people became excited about the possibilities that he presented. Number one. Number two, we had just endured eight years of a President that can barely string together two sentences without making a mistake. And suddenly comes this guy out of Chicago politics. Very young Senator who is eloquent. He attracted everybody’s attention when he spoke at the Democratic national convention four years earlier. And nobody really thought he was going to make it. I didn’t. I didn’t think he would ever be elected early in the campaign. He was only after the Iowa caucus. Iowa is a literally white farming state which is conservative, conservative, conservative. They voted strongly for Barack Obama. And when that happened, everybody in the news media, everybody in the nation looked up and said: “Wait a minute, we are ready. A black man can be President.” That’s what made it excitement.

What makes a great story?
There are many great stories. I just saw a great story less than 24 hours ago. A little girl on a second to the last day in school in the United States. And after being away a year, her father returned home from Iraq as a soldier. They meet, they hug, in her classroom. Very moving story. Human interest story. I saw the pictures. The little girl couldn’t speak for two minutes. She couldn’t speak. Great story. Alright? Another pop story. This woman, Suzan Boyle. You know, she sang and sang and she is all over Youtube and everything else. That’s a great story. You know that it’s only going to end in tragedy, if you are a journalist. But for the moment, it’s a great story. Great stories are great investigations. One of my favourites was after the Rwandan genocide. The Rwandan government in exile, the ones who engineered that genocide found exile in Kenya and they were doing an arms deal. I went to one of the wives of one of the guys asking where he was. She said, he is in the hotel over there and we went over, turned on the cameras, walked in, they were doing an arms deal with the Western arms dealer. He is going to sell the Hutu militiamen more guns and more arms.

We got it all on camera. The guy picks up his bag. And then he is trying to get all of these things with all the list of ammunition and how much they cost. And the guys from Rwanda are going nuts with us. They take a swing at the camera. That’s a great story. A story that is great? Sitting in Kosovo and the White House is saying: “The Vice President Al Gore has been assured by Moscow that Moscow’s troops would wait until NATO troops come into Kosovo so that they can stabilize the situation.” And on the street outside, I hear cheering, I hear guns being fired, I hear tanks rumbling. And I look down and here come amphibian units of the Russian military with the Russian flag all over them. A pregnant Serb woman runs out. She says to the soldier. She hands them a bottle of vodka and says: “I am going to name my son Seregey after you.” And we have all these colours. I call back to the office and say: “You won’t believe this. The Russians are rolling in.” And it sounded impossible because they have assured Al Gore. We all know it was true. They took up positions at the airport. But just to see those things rolling through when everybody said they wouldn’t was great.

Who in your own estimation is the greatest American president among the ones you have covered in the last 25 years?
Boy, it is very difficult, because so many years that I was overseas, we had Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton. But I can tell you the one that stands out in my mind—and this might surprise you—he only served one term: Jimmy Carter. Because Jimmy Carter stood up for America and he represented us as we really are with his efforts to democratize, to help oversee and monitor elections in Africa, Latin America and around the globe. His efforts to eradicate diseases like guinea worm. He almost eradicated them. And you think of the pain and the suffering that the people have endured with this for how many years? How many hundreds of years? And he set a goal to eradicate it and they are reaching it because it was a realistic goal. But you had to do the right thing. And he oversaw all of that. In the United States itself and elsewhere around the world, he’s got Habitat for Humanity which builds homes that people can afford. They have to put in their sweat equity. And Habitat for Humanity gives people a place to live.

So individuals, countries, all classes of people who suffer from illness and disease have benefitted greatly from Jimmy Carter. He makes me very proud of who he is. He is the only American President that really successfully negotiated a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. I mean Oslo was a beautiful peace deal, it was a great sunny day to see Yasser Arafat shaking hands with Yitzhak Shamir. There was progress made but you can’t say it was a peace deal. Egypt got back the Sinai, Israel got peace with its largest Arab state in the world because Jimmy Carter refused to allow Menachem Begin to walk out of the negotiations with Anwar Sadat.

So how come he didn’t win election the second time around?
Because mortgage rates were 21 percent. What he did do was he appointed Paul Volcker to be head of the Federal Reserve System and it was Paul Volcker that really brought the economy around with his fiscal policy. Ronald Reagan got the credit for it but Jimmy Carter appointed him. It was a financial mess for Jimmy Carter. That was why he lost. That’s why most politicians will lose an election because voters in the United States are like voters in Nigeria. We vote with our wallets.

No in Nigeria we don’t vote at all.
No, you pay somebody else to go vote for you fifty times. No, I’m kidding.
We vote and they don’t count it. They had written the result the previous day even before the voting.
Okay, guys, this would be the last question.

What does it mean to report?
It goes back to what it means to be a journalist. That’s the same answer. Final question.

So, what’s news?
The arrogant thing to say is that news is that news is whatever I say it is. But I told you what I thought the best stories were. The best stories don’t have to be an investigation. They have to be something that reaches out of touch with the audience. Something that would leave them talking about for the rest of the day and maybe the rest of the week, that they remember. That’s the good story. Being a journalist mean being a student for life. Learning from other people and learning to share that with a wider audience whether it is good news or bad news.

Where is Jim Clancy going career-wise?
Career-wise? To retirement. I am an anchorman now, I probably would remain that. At some point in time, if I stop doing that, I would go back to being a correspondent, maybe working on individual projects that interest me, telling stories and that way.

What advice do you have for journalists who want to be like you?
Get up very early in the morning, read everything you can, try to bring something new to the table. And don’t think you are going to do it in eight hours. Don’t think that it isn’t going to take an extra effort every day. You have to be excellent. You have to strive to be excellent to give everybody a chance to be heard, to go one step further in order to really make a difference in your trade.