Is Amanpour Too Brunette for TV Critics?

The controversy about Christiane Amanpour taking over ABC's This Week shows people can't deal with a brunette anchorwoman in a sea of blondes, Alex Pareene writes in Gawker. Washington Post critic Tom Shales has been cracking jokes about Amanpour's bad hair. Pareene retorts that it "seems pretty normal—besides, you know, not being blonde." And then there are Shales' "over the line" attacks on Amanpour for being half-Persian.

Shales "has a really nasty tendency to suspect non-Jews with family ties to the Middle East of bias" regarding Israel, Pareene writes. "Amanpour is anti-Israel because 60 people joined a Facebook group and she's from (pre-Islamic Revolution) Iran? Ugh." The real problem with moving Amanpour to This Week isn't her hair, it's that "we're taking one of our very few television celebrities who does anything to educate television-watching Americans about foreign affairs and sentencing her to a career of eliciting canned responses from the same idiot elected officials," Pareene notes.
(More Christiane Amanpour stories.)