It was a passion that arose from his own experience as a hostage during the siege of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980. Cramer had been at the embassy obtaining a visa when armed men opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini burst in. . After 24 hours as a hostage, he said he was ill and was released, leaving to provide crucial information to authorities about the design of the embassy, the number of gunmen and the hostages.
It was an experience that he later realized had traumatized him in ways he did not understand at the time, and as his career as a news chief began, he remembered the impacts, long before PTSD became a term known to soldiers. And others.
In January 2004 he was in a two-car CNN convoy ambushed by insurgents south of Baghdad. One of our drivers and my translator died and the photographer sitting next to me survived by shooting me in the head. We almost all died that day.
It was Cramer, then executive vice president and general manager of CNN International, who knew exactly what we were going through who survived and acted accordingly.
He had then established a system within the company where staff could access professional help if needed after a traumatic incident, but that day he understood on a personal level our need to stay together on the team as team one more week to process the experience and attend funerals, instead of immediately leaving for our respective scattered homes.
“Among his many accomplishments, Chris was a pioneer and innovator in field security as the world became more dangerous to journalists,” Cramer’s successor on CNN, Tony Maddox, said. continue and expand on what Cramer had begun.
“He led the development of guidelines and practices that are now widely adopted throughout the industry.”
I, for one, will always remember and appreciate Cramer’s empathy for those who had seen and experienced frightening things. I knew from experience what it was like. I was in Iraq 17 times during the war and I also covered conflicts (from Afghanistan to Libya, through Gaza and the West Bank) and I always felt that Chris had his back with the best security and support possible, both tangible as well as emotional.
Before joining CNN in April 1996, Cramer spent 25 years at the BBC. He was head of Newsgathering and served on the BBC’s News and Current Affairs board of directors and was much appreciated by those with whom he worked.
He was also president and founding member of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), a global organization dedicated to the safety of journalists.
As news of Cramer’s passing spread, those who worked with him began to recount his memories of the man and his impact on his careers.
Octavia Nasr was the lead editor of CNN’s Middle East Affairs, a position created by Cramer after the 9/11 attacks. “Chris was an amazing boss,” he recalled.
“I will never forget the lessons I learned from him to be direct and fight for rights: he supported women in senior and executive positions and helped us succeed. I owe him gratitude and respect and you will miss his journalistic ethics and their sense of humor. “
Chris could be many things, sometimes on the same day or within the same meeting. Resistant, forceful and uncompromising, but also charming and perversely funny. And most of all, he was deeply concerned about journalists and good journalism.
He was certainly unique and will be missed.