Eason Jordan was Chief News Executive for CNN, and had been with the news network from 1982 until his resignation in 2005. He studied Journalism at Georgia State University.
Jordan played a key role in planning CNN coverage of world events and conflicts.
He is the recipient of two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and the DuPont-Columbia Award.
Was known for having a relationship with Marrianne Pearl, widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Controversy
On August 16, 1997, Jordan (as CNN Chief News Executive) gave a gift to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in an attempt to improve CNN's access to North Korean affairs. [1] (Jordan had been credited in 1996 with gaining exclusive access to North Korea for CNN reporters.)
On March 10, 1999, while speaking at Harvard, Jordan thanked Cuban President Fidel Castro for his comments instigating CNN's decision to broadcast in other countries, CNN International.
On April 11, 2003, Jordan confessed that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990, but the network abstained 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. He also claimed that American troops were intentionally killing these journalists. [2] That month, al-Arabiya reporter Abdel Kader al-Saadi had been detained by U.S. forces for 11 days during U.S.-led attacks on Fallujah without comment on cause for his dentention. [3]
On January 27, 2005, Jordan claimed that American troops are targeting journalists in Iraq. The charges were said to have been made during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He has since backtracked from the statement. Tapes of the event are being withheld from the public.
On February 11, 2005, Eason 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." The right wing of the blogosphere played a crucial part in achieving his resignation, keeping the story going despite the mainstream media's refusal to run the story at the outset of the scandal
Is it true that she's the younger sister of the Sheehan woman?