Christiane Amanpour’s podcast to ‘pull back curtain’ on world events

CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour says the new podcast series she has launched with her ex-husband and former US diplomat James Rubin will “pull back the curtain” on world events.

Amanpour, the chief international anchor at CNN, is best known for presenting her flagship programmes including The Amanpour Hour and PBS’s Amanpour & Company, and on Tuesday launched her new podcast with Global titled Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin.

The series explores the biggest issues of the day with Rubin, her ex-husband and former US diplomat and assistant secretary of state, while going behind the scenes of old and emerging world events from a government and journalism perspective.

“I thought that people with opposing views can barely get into the same room, whether it’s around the Christmas table or the Thanksgiving table or in politics or whatever.

“I figured if two exes – we’ve been divorced seven years, we were married 20 years – if we can talk about what we’re talking about, then surely anybody can.

“Hopefully, it’s a model for getting people to be able to have conversations even across things that look like insurmountable divides, like political differences, religious differences, ethnic differences, all of that kind of stuff as modelled by two exes.

“So from 1990 to now, 35 years in which he was on the government side and I was on the journalism side.

“I was in the field. He was in the bureaucracy, in the government, and talking about the back story, and pulling back the curtain on a lot of the episodes that we sort of shared, but from completely different perspectives.”

Amanpour first joined the foreign desk at CNN in 1983 and went on to become a field reporter and interviewer, leading her to cover the likes of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Bosnian War to being the last person to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi before he was killed.

Meanwhile, Rubin worked as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and chief spokesman for then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright while also working for the Biden administration up until December 2024.

Speaking about the new podcast, Amanpour made clear that this was not a move away from legacy media but rather an opportunity to experiment with the medium and a chance for her to be more personal, offering her perspective and views on the events that have shaped and continue to change the world.

She added: “I’m not ready to give up on legacy media, CNN, for instance, which I’ve been at for 41 and a half years, but I most certainly wanted to be part of the current media conversation. I find this one really, really interesting.

“I decided that I would like to experiment with having a bit more freedom in my own personal views, opinions, emotions, because I clearly keep that out of what I do on CNN.

“I really want to get much more behind the scenes, try to pull back the curtain, do the back story of how various crises emerge, or how diplomacy works to get out of various crises, what different leadership means in these very fraught times, and we live in very fraught times right now.

“We are in a completely different world order. I call it no-world order, especially since Donald Trump was elected, because he has a completely different view of the presidency and the power of the presidency and how it should be used and deployed.

“So for us, it’s a lot of raw material to deal with and to explore, examine, follow, and eventually, come down in judgment on one way or the other.

“Yeah, it’s all about news and all about foreign affairs, but it has a much deeper human dynamic and much deeper and more personal dynamic from me as a journalist and Jamie my ex as a former government official.”

Despite the ever-changing digital landscape within journalism, Amanpour remains firm on the importance of field reporting.

She said: “There is no substitute for reporters in the field. I mean, there just isn’t, bots can’t go out there.

“It’s not an analyst job to tell us what’s happening on the front line, or what’s happening in a city under siege … it’s reporters, it’s those of us who are willing, ready and able to be everybody else’s eyes and ears on the ground.

“That’s our job, and we have to take that incredibly seriously.

“We can’t allow it to strangle our space or to completely suffocate our space, because our space is the only legitimate place where people get the reality and get the real news.

“So I am a person who believes strongly in the enduring mandate of a reporter, the enduring mandate of the television or camera crews, or whoever goes out there to get the news and comes back and puts it together for the audience.”

The Ex Files is Amanpour’s first original podcast series with Global with episodes released once a week on Tuesdays and bonus episodes out on Thursdays.

Listen to the first episode of Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin on Global Player.