Veteran Reporter to anchor ABC’s ‘This Week’ from August

No hearsay this. Speculation over. One of CNN’s best known personalities and interviewing veteran Christiane Amanpour will be ABC News’ newest anchor of “This Week.” She will take over the hot seat in August.

Amanpour, my current desktop hero, will also be the foreign affairs analyst on other ABC News programs and will be anchoring primetime documentaries on international subjects that are her domain.

“A highly respected journalist recognized around the world for her reporting, she brings to her new position a wealth of experience and knowledge, as well as a deep commitment to bringing news of the world to the American people,” ABC News president David Westin said in an internal email.

Amanpour, 52, is my favorite journalist on screen and also my ideal. She has spent 27 years at CNN where she most recently served as chief international correspondent and anchor of “Amanpour.”

In her 18 years as an international correspondent, Amanpour has reported on all the major crises from the world’s many hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and the United States during Hurricane Katrina.

Amanpour (English pronunciation: /krɪstʃiˈɑːn ɑːmənˈpʊər/ ( listen) joined CNN in 1983 as an entry-level assistant on the network’s international assignment desk in Atlanta. She worked her way up to correspondent in CNN’s New York bureau before becoming an international correspondent in 1990. Her first major assignment was the Gulf War, and she has since covered wars, famine, genocide and natural disasters around the globe.

She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe to Africa and beyond, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria and Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat among others. After 9/11 she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Her body of work has earned an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmys, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award and other major journalism awards as well as honorary degrees from The American University of Paris, Georgetown University, New York University, Smith College, Emory University and the University of Michigan.

In 2007, Amanpour was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her “highly distinguished, innovative contribution” to the field of journalism. In 1998, the City of Sarajevo named her an honorary citizen for her “personal contribution to spreading the truth” during the Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor of arts in journalism.

Amanpour, who will start in August, replaces George Stephanopoulos. He left the show in December to take over as co-host of ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Read more about Christiane Amanpour – in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia