Christiane Amanpour Has Terrific Journalistic Debut at ABC

Christiane Amanpour, one of the world's most honored and distinguished journalists and rumored to be its highest paid, deftly moderated her inaugural broadcast of This Week, ABC's Sunday news program counterpart to NBC's Meet the Press.

(Read Profile of Christiane Amanpour, ABC "This Week" Moderator for details of her family background, decades of experience and extraordinary newsmaker access, and accolades.)

To my delight, Amanpour firmly placed her global-perspective stamp on the program, especially on the famed round-table, where conservative Washington Post columnist George Will pointedly fumed and glared in obvious anger at who-knows-or-cares-what. (Loss of control? Moderation by a woman? First-time inclusion of a foreign journalist in round-table chat?)

And Amanpour intelligently controlled round-table discussion, limiting remarks to several top issues and not allowing Will, liberal economist Paul Krugman, or Democratic strategist Donna Brazile to descend into the fake-outrage, often racially-tinged non-issues of the day and or silly, time-wasting partisanship.

Amanpour ruffled some conservative feathers when she introduced the weekly roster of U.S. soldiers killed in war by paying tribute to "all of those who died in war." Eccentric Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales ludicrously twisted this into Amanpour suggesting "that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban."

Amanpour strongly pressed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her personal view of the War in Afghanistan, and quite interestingly, pushed Defense Secretary Robert Gates sufficiently with her firsthand knowledge of Middle East affairs to cause Gates to flinch, then admit that "... we are not leaving Afghanistan in July of 2011. We are beginning a transition process... "

After 27 years at CNN, Amanpour doesn't (yet) exude the splashy pizazz or ratings-grabbing prettiness that CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox still require of female anchors and moderators. (Think ABC's Diane Sawyer, NBC's Katie Couric, and especially, CBS's glamorous Lara Logan.)

Instead, in her debut as ABC This Week moderator, Christiane Amanpour displayed steely intelligence, unflappability, dignity, and a refreshing, fearless drive for raw truth, rather than slickly canned answers and political "truthiness."

I suppose this morning-after outrage is, as the New York Times penned this morning, "because cable talk shows have grown so heated and inane, dominated by the loud, the proud and the sanctimonious, the Sunday programs are usually sedate and dispassionate... " And frankly, far too chummy for the D.C. press corps to ferret out any semblance of unvarnished truth.

I say BRAVO for Ms. Amanpour! Read about her in detail at Profile of Christiane Amanpour, ABC "This Week" Moderator .

I can scarcely wait for her to interview some of the worst offenders of Sunday morning bluster, from blowhard Sen. John McCain pontificating on anything and everything, to Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod, who can cartoonishly say absolutely nothing for longer than anyone else in Washington.