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By Amanda Castro
Associate News Editor
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Christiane Amanpour, one of CNN's most recognizable international journalists, announced Monday that she will leave the network in June 2027 after 43 years.
Her departure will close a career at CNN that stretched from the network's early years through wars in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Ukraine, making her a defining figure in television foreign correspondence.
The 68-year-old will gradually reduce her on-air schedule before her CNN International program ends in May, although she plans to continue reporting and traveling for the network through June.
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"After many months of thought and a few sleepless nights, I have decided to separate from CNN, my partner of 43 fantastic years!" Amanpour said in a statement Monday, according to CNN.
She said she expects to pursue new projects and added that she would continue to support the network and its tradition of independent journalism.
Mark Thompson, CNN's chairman, told staff that he and Amanpour had been discussing the decision for months. He called her "one of the most trusted and beloved journalists anywhere" and thanked her for more than four decades of journalism and service to the network.
Amanpour's daily programs will end at the close of 2026. Beginning in January, her CNN International program will shift to once a week and then conclude in May.
Her PBS program, Amanpour & Company, will also end in December, while she has said she will continue The Ex Files, the podcast she hosts with former husband James Rubin.
Her coming departure provides a natural endpoint from which to look back at the assignments that turned an entry-level CNN employee into the network's chief international anchor.
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Bosnia and Sarajevo Defined Amanpour's Approach to War Reporting
If the Gulf War established Amanpour's reputation, the war in Bosnia helped define the journalism philosophy she became associated with.
Amanpour reported extensively from the conflict and the siege of Sarajevo. During the war, she also interviewed Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić, who was later convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Her reporting from Bosnia made her prominent beyond CNN, but it also sparked debate over whether her coverage crossed the line from objectivity into advocacy.
Amanpour rejected the idea that objectivity required journalists to create equivalence between opposing claims regardless of the underlying evidence. Her response to criticism of her Bosnia coverage became central to her broader argument about journalism: reporters should give competing sides a hearing but should not treat demonstrably unequal circumstances as equal merely in the name of neutrality.
That philosophy remains part of her public identity decades later. In Monday's announcement, Amanpour distilled it into a message about being "truthful, not neutral."
Reporting on Rwanda and the World's Humanitarian Crises
Amanpour's work during the 1990s went well beyond Bosnia. She reported from Rwanda and subsequently covered conflicts and humanitarian crises across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, assignments that helped establish foreign reporting as the through line of her career.
She specifically included Rwanda among the places she remembered when announcing her departure, grouping it with Bosnia, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran as assignments where she and her colleagues tried to document the evidence and human consequences of global conflict.
By then, her role inside CNN had expanded substantially. Amanpour served as the network's chief international correspondent from 1992 to 2010, during which her assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans.
Her work also crossed network boundaries. Beginning in the 1990s, she contributed international reports to 60 Minutes while continuing her work for CNN.
Afghanistan and the Post-9/11 Era
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ushered in another period in which Amanpour's international experience put her at the center of CNN's coverage. Afghanistan became another conflict she later singled out as a defining assignment.
After the attacks, she secured interviews with major leaders confronting the emerging international crisis, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Her reporting placed her at the intersection of battlefield coverage and the diplomacy surrounding the wars that followed 9/11.
Afghanistan also demonstrated the longevity of a career that had already spanned conflicts on several continents. Rather than leaving war reporting behind as she became more established on television, Amanpour continued returning to major international crises while simultaneously becoming one of CNN's principal interviewers.
Amanpour's Interviews With Presidents, Dictators and Global Leaders
Amanpour's career eventually became defined as much by the people sitting across from her as by the conflicts she covered in the field.
Over the decades, she interviewed an unusually broad range of political leaders, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami, Hassan Rouhani, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as Musharraf, former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, former Prime Minister of Libya Muammar Gaddafi, French President Emmanuel Macron and former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. Other high-profile interviewees included Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the Dalai Lama.
In February 2011, while working for ABC News, Amanpour interviewed Gaddafi and his sons amid the uprising against his government. The interview fell during her brief period away from CNN after she left the network in 2010 to anchor This Week.
She returned to CNN International in 2012 under an arrangement that initially allowed her to retain a role with ABC. Her interview program Amanpour became the central platform for the next phase of her career.
The Iran Interview Amanpour Walked Away From
One of Amanpour's most widely discussed interviews in recent years never happened.
In September 2022, she was scheduled to interview the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. Raisi's team canceled the interview after requesting that Amanpour wear a headscarf during the appearance, according to accounts of the episode.
Amanpour, who is Iranian-British and spent part of her childhood in Tehran, refused. She later said that despite interviewing Iranian presidents since the 1990s, no one had ever asked her to cover her hair when interviewing someone outside Iran.
The episode came as protests were unfolding in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, making the disagreement over the interview's conditions particularly consequential.
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CNN's Skydance Takeover and the Ellisons' Trump Relationship
Amanpour's announcement comes less than two weeks after one of the biggest corporate changes in CNN's history.
On October 6, Skydance-owned Paramount completed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, bringing CNN and CBS News under the same corporate owner. Including debt, the acquisition amounted to nearly $111 billion. The combined company, known as Skydance, is led by billionaire David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz.
The newsroom implications have attracted particular scrutiny because of the Ellison family's relationship with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked CNN over its coverage. The Associated Press reported that the Ellison family has long supported Trump, and Larry Ellison, David Ellison's father and co-founder of Oracle, has financially supported him. Trump welcomed the completed merger this month, saying Skydance was "going to be a great company."
David Ellison has pledged to preserve editorial independence. A settlement reached with states that challenged the merger also requires Skydance to create a board to oversee editorial independence at CNN and CBS News, while Thompson remains in charge of CNN's news operation.
The takeover's proximity to Amanpour's announcement is notable, but no evidence has been reported so far that the change in ownership prompted her decision.
When she finally signs off next June, she will leave amid another transformation, this time not on a battlefield overseas but inside the company where her career began.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Anthony Murray and Samantha Beech.
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