Ivan Watson Biography

Watson is an American journalist  working as a senior international correspondent for CNN based at the network’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong.

Ivan Watson Age

Watson was born on November 25th , November , 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia, the United States of America.

Ivan Watson Career

Watson was a producer for CNN based in Russia, and later a reporter for CNN. He has covered significant news such as the civil unrest in Egypt, and the Second Chechen War in Haiti among other stories .

Watson is CNN’s senior international correspondent based in Hong Kong. He moved to the city in the summer of 2014 after five years of being based in Istanbul and Turkey as a CNN correspondent. In 2014 he moved to the city in order to focus on reporting from the Asia Pacific region.

During his time at CNN, Watson has travelled across the world, reporting on a wide range of stories. Most recently, he covered Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution pro-democracy movement.
In 2013, Watson reported on the devastation and struggle for survival in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan. He also broadcast from Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, where at the height of the Arab Spring, Watson and veteran cameraman Joe Duran filmed CNN’s iconic and disturbing images of the “Battle of the Camel.” In 2010, Ivan was part of CNN’s award-winning team of reporters who landed in the earthquake-shattered capital of Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

While he was based in Istanbul, Ivan charted the deadly government crackdown on protesters in neighboring Syria and the country’s descent into civil war. He made multiple trips into rebel-controlled parts of Syria and also documenting the surge of refugees across the border into Turkey. He also reported on the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of thousands of minority Christiansand Yazidis in Iraq by ISIS.

Ivan Watson Salary

Watson Salary estimates as a CNN correspondent range 93,050 million USD to 199,748 million USD annualy . However, the figures vary according to the the position of someone at job .

Ivan Watson Net Worth

Watson has an estimated net worth of 1 million USD . He has accumulated his wealth from his successful career as a journalist. Watson has been in the media industry for more than a decade. He has no doubt amassed a huge fortune with the bulk of his wealth coming from his professional journalism career.

Ivan Watson Family

Watson were born three, having a younger brother, and a younger sister. He is of American national and white ethnicity . His parents background details is not much known publicly , this section shall be updated once information is available .

Ivan Watson Wife

Watson is married to Rana Wehbe Watson. The couple tied a knot on 8th ,May , 2020 .He proposed to Rana in New York City on December 21, 2019. Rana grew up in Beirut in a civil war. At a young age, she suffered the loss of her father, one of the many tragic victims of that conflict.

Ivan Watson Wedding 

“Can we take our masks off ? ” I ask, as my bride and I get into position .

“You may,” responds a Hong Kong official, who is still wearing his mask.
Moments later, Rana and I exchange rings, sign government documents, and share a brief kiss. Amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, Rana and I have just gotten married.

On the other side of the planet, our families and friends in the US, Lebanon, and elsewhere virtualy followed the little civil ceremony in Hong Kong on Instagram, sprinkling the video with hearts and emojis and other social media expressions of happiness. Before leaving the wedding registry, we put on our surgical masks adorned with the titles “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

This was not what we expected when I first asked her to marry me on a freezing night in New York City last December. At the time, we were both jet-lagged after the long flight from Hong Kong, where we lived and work. We were also deliriously happy, posing in front of a glowing fountain alongside my sister and brother-in-law, who conspired with me to take surprise photos of the occasion.

Basking in that happy moment, we had little clue that a deadly new strain of pandemic had just been discovered in a city called Wuhan in China — and the next four and a half months of our lives became our Engagement with Coronavirus.

While my childhood was much more comfortable, 20 years of reporting overseas exposed me to the grim realities of war, natural disaster, and political instability. Still, neither of us had ever been confronted by a modern-day plague of global proportions.

The wake-up call came at the end of January, when the Hong Kong administration canceled schools, shut down public recreation centers and issued work-from-home orders to civil servants. The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan had spread across China, and the first cases had been detected in the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau. Hong Kongers didn’t mess around. Immediately, the whole city started wearing masks.

Friends and family back home called to express concern about our health. But they spoke about the epidemic as if it was some distant threat, an “Asian” problem that would never reach their shores. As Rana became more and more worried, I remained naively optimistic — until a reporting assignment in South Korea at the end of February.

At that stage, South Korea had the most confirmed coronavirus cases outside mainland China. In early March, thousands of Koreans were testing positive on a daily basis. Governments increasingly imposed international flight restrictions. Seemingly overnight, my hotel in Seoul became eerily empty.
On March 10, the only way to get from South Korea back home to Hong Kong was to fly absurdly long distances via London.

On the flight from South Korea, CNN cameraman Tom Booth and I were shocked to see British Airways crews operating without any protection. No one checked our temperature during the layover at London’s Heathrow Airport. Britain apparently behaved as if this deadly disease wasn’t happening. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, health authorities put me on two-week mandatory medical surveillance.

I was to check my temperature twice daily and report immediately if I came down with symptoms. Though authorities advised against it, Rana insisted on staying by my side throughout the 14 days. Fortunately, neither of us got sick. After our engagement with coronavirus, we know we will be there for each other, no matter what the future may bring. ”

Ivan Watson Education

Watson studied and graduated from Brown University with a degree in International Relations.

Ivan Watson NPR

Watson rejoined CNN in 2009 from NPR, where he spent eight years reporting extensively on major stories around Central Asia, Middle East, and West Africa. While at NPR, he covered US invasion and troubled occupation of Iraq and the US-led overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Before joining NPR, Watson had worked as a Moscow-based producer for CNN in the late 1990s.

All through his career, he has sought to share his affection for countries in the region with audiences, by reporting on the quirks and cultural treasures of societies that rarely grab headlines.

His topics range from profiling a millionaire doctor who used hypnosis and shamanistic traditions to treat heroin addicts in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan to romping with Turkey’s enormous and treasured Kangal sheepdogs in the highlands of Anatolia.

CNN’s “World’s Untold Stories” aired a documentary in 2010, reported by Watson and Istanbul cameraman Joe Duran which documented the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople’s efforts to protect Istanbul’s dwindling Greek community from disappearing altogether.

Ivan Watson Great Barrier Ree

In a half-hour documentary, Ivan dived underwater to see the impact of climate change on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Damage, which the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs, Charlie Veron, claims could trigger a “mass extinction”.

Ivan met with Charlie, who has spent 45 years of his life diving in the Great Barrier Reef and has personally discovered 20 percent of the world’s coral species.

The marine park is bigger than two-thirds of the countries on Earth. Veron took Ivan Watson deep into aquamarine waters to get a snapshot of the reef’s ecosystem and the impact of climate change up close.

Veron explained to Ivan how the Australian government has pumped nearly $400 million into protecting the reef but still insisted that money alone cannot provide a solution.

When asked what lessons people should take from the current plight of the reef, told Ivan: “Coral bleaching is driven by carbon dioxide unless you stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it’ll go on. It’s as simple as that.

There’s no way around it, there’s no alternative… The lesson from geology is that’s the trigger of mass extinction. We can’t – as humans – can’t exist independently of the welfare of that planet.”