By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Veteran journalist Christiane Amanpour was named on Thursday to anchor the ABC News' Sunday morning program "This Week" starting in August, after 27 years as an international correspondent for CNN.
Amanpour, 52, was hired to replace George Stephanopoulos, the former White House aide who became the new anchor of ABC's weekday breakfast-hour show "Good Morning America" in December.
ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper will serve as the regular, interim anchor for "This Week" until the debut of Amanpour in August, the Walt Disney Co-owned network said.
ABC News President David Westin said the network would capitalise on Amanpour's background as a foreign-based reporter to bring a more global perspective to "This Week," a talk show that has tended to focus on U.S. newsmakers and politics.
Westin said Amanpour also would appear on other ABC News programs "to provide international analysis on issues of the day" and to anchor prime-time documentaries on global subjects.
The London-born journalist, whose father is Iranian and mother is British, built her career reporting for CNN from some of the world's most troubled and conflict-ridden regions, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda and the Balkans.
She married U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin in 1998.
Amanpour also is known to commercial network news audiences as an occasional contributor to the weekly CBS News magazine "60 Minutes."
Her departure from CNN after 27 years comes at a troubled time for Time Warner Inc's cable network, whose ratings are in a slump, and for ABC News, which recently undertook a reorganization involving one of its biggest cutbacks in years.
She is set to join ABC after "This Week" had managed to narrow its ratings gap with the No. 1 Sunday morning talk show, NBC's "Meet the Press," hosted by White House correspondent David Gregory.
Stephanopoulos left "This Week" in December to replace Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America" after she took over as anchor of ABC's flagship evening newscast, "World News," when Charles Gibson retired.
(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
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