ABC “This Week With Christiane Amanpour” Debut Is Ratings Low, Panned by Critics
HUMAN EVENTS
Christiane Amanpour first Sunday as the new host of ABC News’ This Week public affairs Sunday show was panned by the public and media. The show is “unwatchable,” says one former ABC staffer. “She has remedial knowledge of politics,” says another ABC alum. “She’s totally pretentious.”
The low ratings for the debut show reflect the viewers dislike of Amanpour’s approach to political debate. ABC’s This Week came in third place on Sunday, with 2.21 million viewers; NBC’s Meet the Press won the time slot with 2.81 million and CBS’ Face the Nation was second with 2.38 million.
The long-time foreign affairs correspondent for CNN, Amanpour was lured to ABC with a $2 million a year contract to take over for George Stephanopoulos who now hosts Good Morning America. ABC president David Westin was criticized for the bizarre pairing of a foreign affairs correspondent with the show on U.S. politics. One former network TV exec calls Amanpour’s hosting a “new forms of elitism… see how many people you can offend.”
Amanpour’s lack of knowledge of U.S. politics was most glaring in her exclusive interview with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The interview was more “Schoolhouse Rock” than the policy depth accustomed to Sunday shows.
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She asked Pelosi such simplistic, touch-feely questions such as: “Are you nervous about November?”; “But what does your gut tell you?”; and “For me, looking in from outside, it just seems … to be a never-ending partisanship. What is it you can do for the people in this highly polarized situation?”
Executive Producer Ian Cameron (who is married to President Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice) made no bones about Amanpour’s political inexperience. ““She really wants to avoid the politics, in part because she has even admitted that that’s not what she has done,” he told Politico.
For the roundtable segment of the show, Amanpour had George Will, Paul Krugman and Donna Brazille in the studio to debate. She then introduced Ahmed Rashid as “the Pakistani journalist who is the world authority on the Taliban.” Rashid was remote via satellite from Madrid, of all places. For no apparent reason, she asked Rashid to comment on U.S. political issues.
Although Amanpour was named host of the show last March, she did not start until August because she wanted to spend the summer on vacation in the South of France. Amanpour is married to Jamie Rubin, the former spokesman at the State Department under President Bill Clinton.
(Disclosure: I worked at ABC “This Week” for three years when the show was hosted byDavid Brinkley and by Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson.)
