PERSON: Candy Crowley

Retired Chief political correspondent

Crowley started her career as a newsroom assistant with the Washington, D.C.-based radio station WASH‑FM. She was an anchor for Mutual Broadcasting and the White House correspondent for the Associated Press. She moved from NBC to CNN in 1987. She hosted Inside Politics in place of Judy Woodruff before the show was replaced with The Situation Room. In February 2010, Crowley succeeded John King as an anchor of the Sunday morning political talk show State of the Union.

Crowley has been characterized by the Los Angeles Times as a “straight shooter,” her career as “sophisticated political observation, graceful writing, and determined fairness,” and her style as “no-nonsense”. The L.A. Times article says that because of this criticism of her reporting is equally distributed between the Democratic and Republican parties.

Crowley has won several awards, including the Broadcasters’ Award from the Associated Press, the 2003 and 1998 Dirksen Awards from the National Press Foundation, the 1997 and 2005 Joan Shorenstein Barone Award, a 2003 Emmy Award for her work on CNN Presents Enemy Within, the 2004 Gracie Allen Award for her war coverage, a National Headliner and a Cine award, the 2005 Edward R. Murrow Award, and the 2012 William Allen White Foundation National Citation from the school of journalism at the University of Kansas for her expertise on “politics, politicians, and the events that have changed the world.”

Crowley served as the moderator October 16, 2012 for the second presidential election debate between President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent Mitt Romney. She received both criticism and praise for interjecting during the debate regarding the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Controversy arose when Crowley backed Obama’s claim he stated the Benghazi attack was the result of terrorism, when her network news agency, CNN, had previously reported on September 21, 2012 that Obama only described the Benghazi attacks as terrorism “for the first time” on September 20, nine days following the attacks. She was the first woman to moderate a presidential debate since ABC’s Carole Simpson in 1992.

On March 17, 2013, following their CNN report on the guilty verdict of two Steubenville high school football players for the rape of an unconscious sixteen-year-old, Crowley and fellow journalist Poppy Harlow were criticized for giving too much coverage to how the verdict would affect the defendants’ lives.

After twenty-seven years on air, CNN announced on December 5, 2014 Crowley’s decision to leave the network.

— Wikipedia