Margaret Brennan (born March 26, 1980)[1] is an American journalist who is the current moderator of Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan on CBS News, the network's chief foreign affairs correspondent, and a fill-in and substitute anchor for CBS Evening News.[2][3][4] Brennan was previously a White House correspondent for CBS and has covered Washington since 2012.
Before CBS, Brennan anchored the weekday show InBusiness with Margaret Brennan on Bloomberg Television. She was also a CNBC correspondent contributing to various NBC News programs.
Brennan was born on March 26, 1980, in Stamford, Connecticut, to Edward Brennan and Jane Brennan, an elementary school art and art history teacher in the Pennsbury, Pennsylvania, school district.[5] She is of Irish descent.[6]
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.[9]
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.[11][12]
"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."
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.[14] 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 Mubarakstepped down after 30 years in power.[15]
Brennan left Bloomberg in 2012;[18] on April27, 2012, she hosted her last show of InBusiness. There was no reason for her departure other than the chance to pursue new opportunities.[19]
CBS News
Brennan with Secretary of State John Kerry in 2015Brennan interviews US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019
Brennan joined CBS News in July 2012 and has been based in Washington since that time. She reported on the White House throughout the Obama and Trump administrations for CBS programs[2] and is a substitute anchor 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 the president's hardline policy against North Korea.[20]
The interview made headlines in Pyongyang and Seoul, where Brennan's etiquette was the topic of a morning show.[21]
At a press conference on September 9, 2013, she asked Secretary of StateJohn 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"[22] (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.[23]
On February 22, 2018, she was named the 10th moderator of Face the Nation, the CBS Sunday morning political interview program, becoming the second woman to moderate the program.[24] On October 1, 2024, she was one of the moderators of CBS' 2024 United States vice presidential debate.[25]
During a February 2025 episode of Face the Nation in a interview with Secretary of StateMarco Rubio Brennan criticized Vice President of the United StatesJD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany the day prior,[26] where Vance criticized European allies for adopting a "soviet-style" approach to political censorship[27] and religious censorship.[28][29][30] Brennan pointed out the fact that Chancellor Olaf Scholz highly criticized Vance's speech saying "that is why we will not accept outsiders interfering in our democracy, our elections, and in the democratic formation of opinions in support and for the benefit of this party … that is not appropriate[31] – especially among friends and allies,[32] and we firmly reject this."[33][34][35] In defense of Scholz's criticism of Vance, Brennan then incorrectly said to Rubio "Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,[36] he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views[37] and some historic ties to extreme groups.[38] The context of that was changing the tone of it.[39] And you know that."[40][41][42] Rubio responded to Brennan saying, "Well, I have to disagree with you.[43] Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities,[44] and they had a list of people they hated,[45] but primarily the Jews.[46] There was no free speech in Nazi Germany.[47][48] There was none.[49] There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.[50] They were the sole and only party that governed that country.[51][52] So that's not an accurate reflection of history.".[53][54][55] Brennan never responded to Rubio's answer.
Irish America magazine named her one of the top Irish Americans and one of the top 100 Irish-Americans in business and in media. In 2003, she was named one of the top journalists under the age of 30 by the NewsBios/TJFR Group.[56]
Brennan received the Fulbright Award for International Understanding in 2010.
In 2020, she won a Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council.[58] In 2021, she received first place in the National Headliner Awards for her coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak in "Facing the Pandemic".[59]
Personal life
On April 11, 2015, Brennan married Yado Yakub, a Syrian-American[60] attorney who is a judge advocate in the United States Marine Corps.[61][62][63] During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on April 30, 2018, Brennan announced she was pregnant with their first child, a boy who was born on September 11, 2018.[64] She announced on Instagram on December 23, 2020, that she was expecting her second child.[65] Her second child, a son, was born on April 28, 2021.[66]
↑ "Margaret Brennan". Irish America Magazine. Margaret is a third-generation Irish American with roots in Co. Galway on her father's side and Sligo on her mother's side.
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