Eason Jordan

Eason T. Jordan is the director of operations and communications at the Malala Fund, the education-focused foundation founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. He joined the Malala Fund in January 2014.

Previously, he served as general manager of NowThis News, an upstart video news network distributed primarily via mobile devices and social networks.The New York-based company debuted in the fall of 2012. Its primary audience is the digital generation, millennials. In its first months since launch, NowThis News garnered viewers in 216 nations and territories.

From 2005 until 2012, Jordan was an entrepreneur who launched and led several small companies, including Poll Position, Headline Apps, and Praedict.

Prior to that, he worked for 23 years at CNN (1982-2005), where he served as the network's chief news executive and president of newsgathering and international networks. He is 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.

Jordan serves on the leadership council of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the North America board of the International News Safety Institute, the board of directors of the Fugees Family, and the advisory board of Peacetree Productions. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the ONE Campaign.

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, firsthand reports from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, for most of the war, this is widely considered the event that "put CNN on the map".

Controversy

On April 11, 2003, Jordan revealed that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990 in a New York Times story called "The News We Kept to Ourselves".[1]

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"—claims that Jordan denied.[2] However, U.S. News & World Report editor-at-large David Gergen, who moderated the discussion,[3] and BBC executive Richard Sambrook defended Jordan and claimed his remarks, though controversial, were not as extreme as they were hyped and that he did not deserve to be removed from CNN.[2][3]

Resignation

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".[4] In a 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".[5]

References

  1. ↑ "The News We Kept to Ourselves", New York Times
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Kurtz, Howard (February 12, 2005). "CNN's Jordan Resigns Over Iraq Remarks". The Washington Post.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "CNN.com". CNN.
  4. ↑ Kurtz, Howard (12 February 2005). "CNN's Jordan Resigns Over Iraq Remarks". Washington Post.
  5. ↑ Kurtz, Howard (February 12, 2005). "CNN's Jordan Resigns Over Iraq Remarks". The Washington Post.

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