As FishbowlDC first reported yesterday, Christiane Amanpour has been offered the job of hosting ABC’s Sunday morning public affairs show, “This Week.” And while Amanpour and her husband, the diplomat Jamie Rubin, live in New York, a person familiar with the show tells us even if she makes the move ABC News, “This Week” will continue to be broadcast out of Washington, keeping staffers in place and keeping the show at the Newseum.
FBDC also reports that Amanpour, pictured at the Women in the World conference this past weekend in New York, would want to take the show away from the inside-the-beltway bent and give it a foreign affairs focus. Which would counter-program the other three network Sunday morning shows, but is there an appetite for that kind of broadcast show on Sunday morning?
Amanpour’s eponymous CNN show, which airs Sunday’s at 2pmET on CNN/U.S., has been averaging 410K Total Viewers (101K in the A25-54 demo) since its debut on Sept. 27, 2009. That’s down 37% in Total Viewers (down 47% in the demo) compared to what was on CNN/U.S. during the same period the year before (which would include the final weeks of the 2008 election, and first few months of the Obama administration, a period of high viewership).