Radio-Canada has named current Washington correspondent Azeb Wolde-Giorghis as the new anchor of its late-night Téléjournal, effective August 17. She will succeed Céline Galipeau, who is moving to host a new international affairs program.
Wolde-Giorghis brings decades of reporting experience to the role. Over the past 30 years, she has covered major events and major public debates, including the return of Hutu refugees to Rwanda, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools, the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation, and numerous election campaigns in Canada and the United States. Radio-Canada says her field experience, along with her understanding of North American politics and global issues, fits the mission of this edition of the Téléjournal.
Born in Ethiopia in the early 1970s, Wolde-Giorghis left her home country with her family because of the political situation at the time. That forced exile later became the basis for the documentary L’Éthiopie de mon cœur, in which she revisits the period of the Red Terror and the country’s more recent transformation. She grew up in Montreal after arriving in Canada.
A political science graduate, she has worked for Radio-Canada in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Maritimes and Montreal. She also helped launch Radio-Canada’s first bureau in Africa in 1998 and covered several conflicts before becoming the broadcaster’s London correspondent from 2001 to 2010. She has been based in Washington for nearly five years.
Her career has been recognized with multiple awards. In 1996, she received Amnesty International’s journalism prize for her reporting on the return of Hutu refugees to Rwanda two years after the genocide. In 1999, she won the Bayeux Prize for war correspondents for her reporting on the civil war in Sierra Leone. In 2000, she was included in The Globe and Mail’s list of the 100 young Canadian leaders under 30. In 2002, she received an excellence award from the Canadian Medical Association for Chains of Fear, her documentary report on mental health treatment in Africa. More recently, she received the Raymond-Charette Prize in 2022 for excellence in French-language journalism and was named Reporter of the Year at the Gala Dynastie in 2022 and 2024.
Wolde-Giorghis said she approaches the new role with humility and is guided by humanity and rigor. She said the Téléjournal remains an essential reference point for understanding current events in a rapidly changing multipolar world.
After 18 years as anchor of the late-night Téléjournal, Céline Galipeau will officially step down on August 17. Her new international news program will air Fridays at 8 p.m. on ICI RDI and Sundays at 5 p.m. on ICI Télé.
