Christiane Amanpour for 'This Week'?
- While Amanpour is highly regarded throughout the industry, she's still a surprising candidate given that she’s always been focused on international news. AP Photo
Still searching for a permanent host for “This Week,” ABC News is in talks with Christiane Amanpour, the CNN foreign correspondent known more for globe-trotting reporting than talking politics within the Beltway.
Amanpour, through a CNN spokesperson, declined to comment, but sources with knowledge of the hiring process say she’s now in the mix of internal and external candidates ABC is considering to replace George Stephanopoulos, who left for “Good Morning America” in December.
Since Stephanopoulos’s departure, the network has kept the Sunday show seat warm with a steady stream of ABC correspondents: Jake Tapper, Terry Moran, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Karl and Elizabeth Vargas.
This Sunday, Matthew Dowd — chief strategist behind the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign and currently a political strategist for the network — will get his turn asking questions of guests Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He’ll also lead the roundtable with regulars like George Will and Donna Brazile.
It will be Tapper again the following week, but after that, it's unclear.
ABC News President David Westin said in an interview with MarketWatch on Wednesday that he expects to have a permanent host in the next few weeks. And that could be an internal choice — Tapper and Moran are thought to be at the top of the list — or an outside candidate.
Earlier in the process, POLITICO reported that ABC contacted PBS’s Gwen Ifill, who was also on the shortlist for CNN’s Sunday show, “State of the Union” — a job that eventually went to Candy Crowley. And now there’s another prominent woman in the mix.
Amanpour, 52, was born in London and raised partly in Tehran, Iran. She is currently chief international correspondent for CNN and host of her own show, “Amanpour.”
While Amanpour is highly regarded throughout the industry, she’s still a surprising candidate given that she’s always been focused on international news — reporting from war zones and sitting down with world leaders — throughout her career. She’s not the first person one would think of to analyze the 2010 horse race or how health care legislation jockeying will play politically.
Amanpour joined CNN in 1983 and first went overseas for the network in 1990, just in time to cover the Gulf War.
In the past 18 years, according to her CNN bio, Amanpour has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda and the Balkans.
She’s sat down with numerous world leaders, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former French President Jacques Chirac and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Amanpour was also a contributor on "60 Minutes" from 1996 to 2005. One of her final reports was a profile of Orange Revolution leader and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
Amanpour is married to James Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state and chief spokesman for the State Department during the Clinton administration.
ABC spokesperson Jeffrey Schneider would not comment on Amanpour but said that the network has “talked to lots of people inside and outside.”