'Globe-Trotting Fancy Pants' Amanpour at ABC is Too Much for Tom Shales

Over the last thirty years, the Washington Post’s Tom Shales has proven himself to be a predicatably partisan leftwing TV critic, as befits any journalist working in the newspaper that’s the home of the JournoList. But evidently, even he has his limits — as Tim Graham of Newsbusters notes, “WaPo’s Shales Sneers at Amanpour as ‘Globe-Trotting Fancy Pants’ Who’d Mourn Taliban Deaths:”

Much thumped in March for a harsh critique of ABC’s choice of Christiane Amanpour as This Week host, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales will get tongues buzzing again Monday as he panned her first episode of the old Brinkley show.

He argued that Jake Tapper had “grown quickly and comfortably” into the Sunday spot: “the adept and likable Tapper stood a good chance of steering This Week into the kind of dominance that Meet the Press has so long enjoyed. And it didn’t require any globe-trotting Fancy-Pants to do it.” Shales even wondered if Amanpour thought we should mourn the Taliban fighters:

Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable “In Memoriam” segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of “all of those who died in war” in that period. Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

Why not? As Graham adds, “Amanpour the Above-It-All Internationalist seems like she’s echoing ABC chief David Westin, who infamously couldn’t decide if the Pentagon was an acceptable target for terrorist attacks,” in the wake of 9/11. Not to mention her old bosses at CNN, who famously shilled for Sadam.