ABC offers
Amanpour 'This Week' job
That's the word, months after Stephanopoulos left
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Mar 16, 2010
The game of musical chairs at ABC News that began last year when Diane Sawyer left "Good Morning America" to succeed Charles Gibson at "World News" may finally be over.
CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour reportedly has been offered the long-vacant "This Week" hosting job, filling a seat vacated by George Stephanopoulos in December after he took Sawyer's place on "GMA."
Amanpour rose to frontrunner over recent weeks after the network also considered two of its own correspondents, Jake Tapper and Terry Moran.
Amanpour would bring with her a star power lacking in the other two, something ABC clearly wanted. It also reportedly talked to former "Nightline" host Ted Koppel and PBS's Gwen Ifill about the job.
Amanpour has not yet accepted the offer, according to Mediabistro's FishbowlDC, which broke the story yesterday.
There are apparently some changes that she wants to make to the format in order to play to her strengths as a veteran international correspondent.
She wants to take the focus off domestic issues and even do some shows abroad, which would set "Week" apart from the other Sunday morning news shows.
ABC and CBS have long trailed NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday mornings. Though "Week" actually beat "Press" once last year among total viewers under Stephanopoulos, NBC had a 600,000-viewer lead over second-place "Face the Nation" during the February sweeps, while ABC lagged more than a million behind.
Neither CNN, where Amanpour has worked for nearly three decades, nor ABC has confirmed the report that Amanpour has been offered the job, the latter saying only that it "will announce something when we have something to announce."
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