Margaret Brennan

Brennan began her business news career in 2002 at CNBC as a producer for prominent financial journalist Louis Rukeyser. She wrote, did research, and booked guests for the weekly Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street program and prime-time specials.[6]

Brennan later worked as a producer on Street Signs with Ron Insana, for which she coordinated guest bookings and produced interviews with former President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.[7]

As a CNBC correspondent, she covered the financial crisis with a focus on consumer issues.

She conducted interviews with former Walmart CEO Lee Scott and Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen. She broke the story of Circuit City's liquidation in 2009 and regularly covered changing consumer trends for the network.[8][9]

On June 24, 2009, Margaret Brennan left CNBC to join Bloomberg Television:[10]

"I think across the board, you can't separate the business stories from the international political stories any longer. Covering the global consumer, covering the global markets—all that is going to be a part of the canvas here."

— Margaret Brennan, Observer

At Bloomberg, she anchored InBusiness with Margaret Brennan, a weekday program broadcast live from the New York Stock Exchange that covered the top political, economic and global financial news impacting the marketplace.[11] During her tenure, she broadcast live from Riyadh, Dubai, Cairo, London, Dublin, Abu Dhabi, and Davos. Brennan covered top breaking news stories involving the European debt crisis, the largest insider trading case in U.S. history, and the BP oil spill. She anchored live from Tahrir Square as Hosni Mubarak stepped down after 30 years in power.[12]

Additionally, Brennan has interviewed the International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde,[13] investor George Soros,[14] and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Ireland's Prime Minister and Dubai's ruler during their respective debt crises.

She also helped to anchor coverage of Bloomberg's 2012 Republican presidential candidate debates.

Brennan left Bloomberg in 2012;[15] on April 27, 2012, she hosted her last show of InBusiness. No reason was given for her departure other than the chance to pursue new opportunities.[16]

Brennan with Secretary of State John Kerry in 2015

Brennan joined CBS News in July 2012. Since 2012, she has been based in Washington and has reported on the White House across the Obama and Trump administrations for CBS programs.[2] She substitute anchors on CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News. Brennan was also part of the CBS News team honored with a 2012-2013 Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award for coverage of the Newtown tragedy.

Brennan's reporting has taken her to Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Beijing, and Havana. She has covered diplomatic negotiations, including the nuclear deal with Iran, the chemical weapons deal in Syria, and the reopening of relations with Cuba. She conducted the first US interview with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, covering her hard-line policy against North Korea.[17] The interview made headlines in Pyongyang and Seoul, where her etiquette was the topic of a morning show.[18] She was also among the first reporters to interview Hillary Clinton about the fatal attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.

At a press conference on September 9, 2013, she asked Secretary of State John Kerry about any possibility for the Syrian government to avoid a U.S. strike. Kerry's answer, that Assad could "turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week"[19] (although later his answer was retracted as "a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied using" by a State Department spokesperson), led Russia's foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov to propose this as a solution to the crisis.[20]

On February 22, 2018, she was named the 10th moderator of Face the Nation, the network's Sunday morning political interview show, becoming the second woman to moderate the program.[21]