Eason Jordan

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Eason T. Jordan (born October 16, 1961) is a former Chief News Executive for CNN. He worked 23 years at the news network from 1982 until his resignation in 2005 and was the recipient of four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and the DuPont-Columbia Award. At the age of 31, he received the Livingston Award's (previously only given posthumously) "Special Citation For Outstanding Achievement" for coverage of the Gulf War, the Soviet crisis, and the African famine. The Livingston Awards for excellence by professionals under the age of 35 are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism. He studied journalism at Georgia State University.

He was portrayed by the actor Clark Gregg in "Live From Baghdad" (2002), a film about the team of CNN journalists who covered the first Gulf War. As CNN was the only news organization broadcasting live first hand reports of the war, this is widely considered the event that "put CNN on the map".

[edit] Controversy

On April 11, 2003, Jordan revealed that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990 and provided gifts to Saddam's family in a New York Times story called The News We Kept to Ourselves[1] Jordan claimed that reporting Saddam's crimes against humanity would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqi informants, and confidentiality was ensured to protect the lives of anti-Hussein Iraqi activists and translators. Critics point out that the suppression of such news carries an aura of a tit-for-tat mentality, as CNN enjoyed a very unique and close relationship with the Iraqi government.

In November 2004 at the News Xchange conference in Portugal, Jordan claimed that United States armed forces were arresting and torturing non-coalition Arabic journalists in Iraq. He offered no proof of this claim.

On January 27, 2005, during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Jordan was reported to have said that American troops were targeting journalists. Although there is no transcript of Jordan's statement, Barney Frank claimed Jordan seemed to be suggesting "it was official military policy to take out journalists", and later added that some U.S. soldiers targeted reporters "maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger".^[1]

Negative reaction in the blogosphere was immediate, and in the mainstream media many American journalists including Jack Schafer of Slate roundly excoriated Jordan for making such claims without any evidence^[2]. Facing backlash Jordan began backpedaling, resorting to generalizations and claims that "some people" knew that the US military "had it in" for foreign journalists. It later came to light that Jordan was involved with the widow of Daniel Pearl, which is thought to have influenced his emotional outburst.^[3].

On February 11, 2005, Jordan resigned to "prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq." [2] In his press release Jordan also stated that "I have great admiration and respect for the men and women of the U.S. armed forces, with whom I have worked closely and been embedded in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Mosul."^[4]

After leaving CNN, Jordan founded Praedict, which describes itself as a "war zone-focused media company providing customized, up-to-the-minute news, intelligence, and safety tips to those in harm's way." Their first project is the Iraq focused news site, Iraqslogger.com.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The News We Kept to Ourselves
• Personal web site
• Eason Jordan's bio at WEF
• Eason Jordan's bio at CNN CNN 1996
• CNN executive: Iraq targeted network's journalists CNN April 11, 2003
• Do US Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?
• CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits AP Reuters February 11 2005
• Iraqslogger.com, Praedict's first project