Eason Jordan
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As Chief News Executive for CNN, Eason Jordan played a key role in planning CNN coverage of world events and conflicts. He worked at the news network from 1982 until his resignation in 2005 and was the recipient of two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and the DuPont-Columbia Award. He studied journalism at Georgia State University.
[edit] Controversy
On April 11, 2003, Jordan revealed that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990, but the network refrained from coverage of them in order to gain better access to information on Hussein's government. Jordan maintained that complete reporting would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqi informants, and confidentiality was ensured to protect the lives of anti-Hussein Iraqi activists and translators.
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. That month, U.S. forces detained al-Arabiya reporter Abdel Kader al-Saadi for 11 days without explanation during U.S.-led attacks on Fallujah. [1] The U.S. has twice dropped bombs on Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Iraq and on November 22, 2005, Britain's Daily Mirror carried a story on the minutes of a meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair in which the U.S. president appeared to propose bombing Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar. The meeting between the two leaders took place during the height of the first battle for Fallujah.
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 in response to a remark from Barney Frank about dead journalists being collateral damage Iraq. [2] 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." [3]
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 product is www.iraqslogger.com.
