Rudi Bakhtiar
Rudi Bakhtiar (born Rudabeh Bakhtiar (in Persian:رودابه بختیار) on June 21, 1966 in Fresno, California) is an Iranian-American journalist, working for the Fox News Channel.
Although born in America, Bakhtiar was raised in Iran until the 1979 Iranian Revolution when her family moved to the United States. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received a B.S. in biology, planning to be a dentist.
Prior to Fox News, Bakhtiar had worked for CNN. Joining CNN in 1996, she became a co-anchor of CNN Student News, the 30-minute commercial free news and features program designed specifically for use in the classroom. She provided multiple reports while on assignment from numerous countries, including South Africa, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Mali. She was on the air live on CNN Headline News on September 11, 2001 when the terrorist attacks of that day began.
In 2002, Bakhtiar received the Iranian American Republic Council Achievement Award.
In 2005, after moving from CNN Headline News to CNN/U.S. to be a correspondent on the program Anderson Cooper 360, Bakhtiar left CNN to pursue other career interests and deal with family health issues.[citation needed]
On January 11, 2006, Fox News announced that Bakhtiar would be joining the network as a general correspondent. She first appeared on the channel on January 22, 2006. Rumors of Fox's interest in Bakhtiar were around as early as December, 2004. Bakhtiar has been tapped to contribute to The Big Story with John Gibson to help improve ratings, replacing Jane Skinner.[citation needed]
Criticism
After the high-profile 2006 arrest of John Mark Karr, Bakhitar went on Fox News insinuating that any man who travels to Bangkok is a pedophile. These comments met criticism with the large population of men travelling to Bangkok and the rest of Thailand for completely legitimate reasons.[1]