Suzanne M. Malveaux ( /suːˈzɑːn mɑːlˈvoʊ/; born December 4, 1966), is an American television news reporter. She is currently the anchor of CNN Newsroom 11am to 1pm. Before that she was White House correspondent for CNN and primary substitute host on CNNs "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer". She joined CNN in 2002.
In August 2007, Malveaux was the moderator of the 31st annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists[1] and has served on various panels at previous conventions of the NABJ, of which she is a member.[2]
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Malveaux, whose first name is pronounced Sue-zahn,[3] was born in Lansing, Michigan into a New Orleans-based family of African, Spanish, and French descent. Her Louisiana French Creole [4] father, Floyd J. Malveaux, is a prominent doctor who became the dean of the College of Medicine at Howard University; he is now the executive director of the Merck Childhood Asthma Network and a founder of Howard University's National Human Genome Center.[5][6][7] Her mother, the former Myrna Maria Ruiz, is a retired schoolteacher. The economist Julianne Malveaux is a distant cousin.[3]
She has three siblings:
Her family lived in New Orleans and later Howard County, Maryland, and she attended Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland.
Malveaux graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. cum laude in sociology. At Harvard, she was a classmate with future CNN reporter Soledad O'Brien.[3] She graduated with a master's degree in broadcasting from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1991.[3]
Malveaux's first television job was with New England Cable News as a general assignment reporter in Boston, Massachusetts, during 1993–1996. She then moved back to Washington, D.C., and worked for NBC affiliate WRC-TV during 1996–1999 as a self-described "rock-and-roll" reporter reporting local and crime news.
In 1999 she joined NBC Network News, three years in Washington, including as a Pentagon correspondent, and three years in Chicago. She covered national stories such as Bill Clinton's impeachment, Elián González, the Kosovo War, the 2000 Presidential Election, the 9/11 attacks, and the 2001 war in Afghanistan.
Since May 2002, she has been a White House correspondent for CNN, based at their Washington, D.C. bureau. She covered the 2008 presidential election cycle from the campaign trail as a member of the network's political team. In advance of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, Malveaux anchored a 90-minute documentary on then-Senator Barack Obama as part of a two-part series on the 2008 general election presidential candidates. Additionally, she served as a panelist questioning the candidates in the Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina sponsored by CNN and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute in January 2008. She also played a key role in CNN's 2004 election coverage and its Emmy-winning 2006 election coverage. Most recently, she has augmented her White House reporting by serving as the primary substitute anchor for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, a two-hour-long program that airs every weekday on CNN.
Ms. Malveaux recently started tweeting on Twitter, the popular microblogging platform. She has posted tweets from all over the world as she covered President Obama's trips to Europe and throughout Latin America.
As Malveaux said in an interview about her position as an African American journalist “When I think of my grandparents and I think about the time of segregation, I think what would they think of their grandchild sitting in that seat, that CNN seat in that small little [White House] briefing room? There [are] only about 20 seats and I’m sitting in one of them. It’s so important that I feel like I’m representing people who couldn’t even imagine that we could be in that kind of position.” [12]
On November 16, 2007 while moderating a debate between candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Malveaux modified a question asked by audience member LaShannon Spencer. Spencer asked what qualities the candidates' nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States should possess. Malveaux directed the question to Senator Chris Dodd and further asked him if he would require nominees to support abortion rights. When the question was put to Senator Joe Biden he responded "Suzanne's decided. I'm not answering her question. I'm answering the question of the woman who was there, okay?"
As White House correspondent, Malveaux has interviewed former presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as former first lady Laura Bush. Her coverage of presidential trips overseas has taken her to Europe, the Balkans, Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
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