Ben Wedeman Biography
Ben Wedeman is a war correspondent and journalist from the United States. Since 2009, he has served as CNN’s lead correspondent in Jerusalem. He has been with the network since 1994 and has won numerous Emmys and Edward Murrow Awards for team reporting.
How old is Ben Wedeman? – Age
He is 61 years old as of 1 September 2021. He was born in 1960 in Washington, D.C.His real name is Benjamin C. Wedeman.
Ben Wedeman Family – Education
His late father Miles G. Wedeman was a Pennsylvania diplomat and civil servant. He was an ardent Quaker. Martha Jean (née Hall) Wedeman, his mother, was a reporter for The Washington Post. Wedeman spent the majority of his childhood outside of the United States, having moved to South Korea with his family in 1968. Following that, the family relocated to Bangkok and Phnom Penh, Cambodia (during the Cambodian Civil War). His father also worked for USAID in the Ivory Coast and Syria.
Wedeman attended boarding schools in Beirut, Lebanon (during the civil war in 1974-75), Tangier, Morocco, and Windsor, Connecticut. In 1982, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Asiatic Languages and Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Ben Wedeman Wife
He is married to Yasmine Perni, who is a journalist, photographer as well as a television producer. The couple has three children.
Ben Wedeman Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth is $2 million.
Ben Wedeman Salary
Ben’s annual average salary is $113,905.
Ben Wedeman Career
Prior to this assignment, Wedeman was based in Rome, Italy, where he covered Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and election as Pope Francis, as well as a series of Italian crises and the migrant crisis. Wedeman has covered the Syrian civil war, the military-backed overthrow of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the Gaza war in 2014, the Iraqi war against ISIS, and the failed Turkish coup d’état in July 2016. Wedeman was previously based in Cairo, where he oversaw the network’s coverage of President Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow. He was the first Western journalist to enter Libya shortly after, and he spent many months covering the effort to destabilize Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in 2011. Prior to that, he worked out of CNN’s Jerusalem bureau, where he focused on Palestinian issues.
In July 2007, Wedeman was the first reporter to report on the release of kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston from Gaza. During Israel’s late-2008-2009 offensive, he was also the first Western reporter to enter Gaza from Egypt. Wedeman reported from south Lebanon in the summer of 2006, where he was CNN’s senior reporter in Tyre during the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Wedeman also covered a string of Balkan wars, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and subsequent Second Intifada, numerous crises in Iraq, and famine and strife in Africa, including award-winning coverage of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. In 2003, he covered the US-led invasion of Iraq from Kurdish territory in the country’s north, where he was among the first journalists to cover the fall of Kirkuk.
He continued to follow developments in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, traveling throughout the country and highlighting the plethora of challenges that coalition forces would face as they attempted to impose order in the post-Saddam era. Wedeman was also the first Western journalist to interview Iraqi detainees tortured by American soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal. In 2002, he was a key figure in CNN’s coverage of Operation Defensive Shield, in which Israel reoccupied the West Bank in retaliation for a series of bloody suicide bombings.
Following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, Wedeman covered the Taliban’s demise in Afghanistan and was the only Western journalist to interview Al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the mountains of Tora Bora via radio and in Arabic. Wedeman then obtained the first interview with Marianne Pearl, the wife of kidnapped – and later executed – Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, Pakistan.
Wedeman has been with CNN since 1994 when he began working as a fixer/producer/sound technician in the network’s Amman, Jordan bureau. In 1995, he was named Amman Bureau Chief, where he was in charge of not only the network’s coverage of Jordan’s evolving relationship with Israel following their historic 1995 peace treaty but also of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. He was also the only Western journalist who was granted an exclusive interview with Udai Saddam Hussein, the notorious son of Iraq’s dictator.
Wedeman’s reporting has been honored with numerous awards. He was a member of the CNN team that won the Overseas Press Club and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best TV Interpretation or Documentary on Foreign Affairs in 1996. Later, he won an Emmy and an Edward R. Murrow award for his coverage of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, a Murrow award for coverage of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, an Emmy and a Peabody award for coverage of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, a Peabody for coverage of Syria’s civil war, and a Peabody for coverage of the Mosul offensive.
Wedeman previously worked as a freelance print journalist in Amman, Jordan, covering news in Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and Sudan. He also worked as a demolition expert for a French oil prospecting company near Raqqa, Syria, and in an international agricultural research center in Aleppo, Syria.