Eason Jordan

Eason T. Jordan is a former Chief News Executive for CNN. 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.

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" [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C16FD3C5F0C728DDDAD0894DB404482] claiming the network refrained from coverage of them in order to gain better access to information on Hussein's government. 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.

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. [http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=11868] 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 W. 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. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6490-2005Feb7.html] 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." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17462-2005Feb11.html]

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.

External links

* [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C16FD3C5F0C728DDDAD0894DB404482 The News We Kept to Ourselves]
* [http://00578ea.netsolhost.com/index.html Personal web site]
* [http://www.weforum.org/site/knowledgenavigator.nsf/Content/Jordan%20Eason?open Eason Jordan's bio at WEF]
* [http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/world.report.conference/speakers.biographies.html#jordan Eason Jordan's bio at CNN] CNN 1996
* [http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/11/sprj.irq.cnn.plot/index.html CNN executive: Iraq targeted network's journalists] CNN April 11, 2003
* [http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2005/01/do_us_troops_ta.html Do US Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?]
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20050212084135/http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/10879701.htm CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits] AP Reuters February 11 2005
* [http://www.iraqslogger.com Iraqslogger.com, Praedict's first project]