The Arab Spring. The killing of Osama bin Laden. The WikiLeaks dump of U.S. embassy cables.
If there ever was a time to try injecting more international news into the tried-and-true, Washington-based Sunday public affairs talk show format, these last 18 months were it. And if there were ever a TV journalist with the resume to pull it off, it was Christiane Amanpour.
Continue ReadingBut in the end, the ratings made clear that was not what Sunday show viewers wanted.
?Sunday morning ? it?s ESPN for political junkies,? said Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic and a friend of Amanpour?s. ?If you try to do anything else with it ? boom.?
When ABC News announced on Tuesday that it was ending Amanpour?s experimental run as the anchor of ?This Week,? few were surprised. The move had been rumored for months, and in recent weeks items about her unhappiness had begun leaking into Page Six. The only question was who would succeed her ? her predecessor, George Stephanopoulos, or White House correspondent Jake Tapper, who ran the show to rave reviews after Stephanopoulos decamped to New York and the anchor job on ?Good Morning America.?
In the end, ABC News went with the better known quantity, even though it meant working Stephanopoulos, who will be keeping his morning job, doubletime.
?This Week with Christiane Amanpour? was a bold experiment that failed, sending all parties back to their comfort zones ? ABC back to Stephanopoulos, Amanpour back to foreign reporting and CNN, where she had made a career as the world?s most famous and respected international correspondent. She?ll host a weekday show on CNN International, but continue to appear on ABC as a global affairs anchor.
But how did such an unexpected arrangement come to be in the first place?
Stephanopoulos, the former Democratic operative and Clinton aide, had done well as the Sunday show host, narrowing the gap with the long-dominant ?Meet the Press? while competing fiercely with ?Face the Nation.?
But when he was named the next anchor of GMA in December of 2009, David Westin, the network?s president at the time, struggled to name a successor. It was widely rumored that his boss, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and his wife, Willow Bay ? who both attended Amanpour?s 1998 wedding to Jamie Rubin, then the State Department spokesman ? had nudged Westin to consider Amanpour for the job.
And in March of 2010, jaws dropped around D.C. when ABC announced it had hired CNN?s biggest international star.
The move made sense for ABC News, which prides itself on attracting marquee anchor talent ? see its current roster of Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and Katie Couric as evidence. And it got Amanpour excited that she could, as she told POLITICO in an interview at the time, ?try to make foreign news less foreign.?
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