Ivan Watson Biography
Ivan Watson is an award-winning CNN senior international correspondent based in Hong Kong at the network’s Asia-Pacific headquarters. He has covered major regional news events such as the spread of the coronavirus across Asia, the Hong Kong protests, the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, the Christchurch terrorist attack, the Lion Air plane crash, the Thai cave rescue, and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
How old is Ivan Watson? – Age
Ivan is 46 years old as of November 25, 2021. He was born in 1975 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Ivan Watson Family
He is the eldest of two, a brother and a sister. Watson earned a BA in International Relations from Brown University. He speaks Russian and French fluently.
Ivan Watson Wife
Watson married his partner, Forbes senior editor Rana Wehbe, in a small ceremony at the local registry. The couple decided on a civil ceremony in February and set their wedding date for May 2nd, 2020. This came just weeks before Hong Kong and the rest of the world had to deal with COVID-19 outbreaks, which have infected over 4.4 million people and killed over 300,000 people worldwide.
Ivan Watson Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $11 Million.
Ivan Watson Salary
Watson earns an annual salary of $50 thousand.
Ivan Watson Career
Watson has also spent the last three years looking into China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. His reporting has taken him all over the world, and in 2021, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his series of special investigations. Watson is also deeply concerned about environmental issues. He was the driving force behind long-form investigative pieces such as the 30-minute documentaries Borneo is Burning and Race to Save the Reef.
Watson spent 12 years in Istanbul before relocating to Hong Kong in 2014. During his tenure, he covered Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power and the “Gezi Park” Occupy protests. He reported from Turkey on the deadly government crackdown on protesters in neighboring Syria, as well as the country’s descent into civil war. He traveled to rebel-held areas of Syria on multiple occasions, while also documenting the influx of refugees into Turkey.
He also reported on the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of hundreds of thousands of minority Christians and Yazidis in Iraq by ISIS. Prior to joining CNN, Watson was a reporter for NPR, where he spent eight years covering major stories in the Middle East, Central Asia, and West Africa. The US invasion and troubled occupation of Iraq, as well as the US-led overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, were major stories. Prior to joining NPR, Watson worked as a CNN producer in Moscow in the late 1990s. He covered Russia’s war in Chechnya, the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Arctic, and the unexpected rise of a former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin to the presidency.
Watson has received numerous awards for his reporting throughout his career. Borneo is Burning, his documentary, won Best Current Affairs Programme at the ContentAsia Awards in 2020. Other awards include the Royal Television Society’s Best News Coverage for Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and two Emmys for coverage of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake.