Shawn, Eric 1957-

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Shawn, Eric 1957-

PERSONAL:

Born March 12, 1957. Education: Georgetown University, received degree.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Fox News, New York, NY, television reporter and news anchor. Also worked as a reporter for WNYC-TV, WPIX-TV, and WNYW TV in New York.

WRITINGS:

The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World, Sentinel (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Fox News anchor Eric Shawn's report The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World is a story of disillusion and disappointment with an institution the author was brought up to respect. "Like a lot of American kids," Shawn told NewsMax interviewer Joan Swirsky, "I was raised as a U.N. supporter. I won the fourth grade UNICEF contest and believed that the United Nations represented compassion and goodness. But as a reporter covering the inner workings of the world body, I was stunned by the reality." According to the author, the United Nations has become a hotbed of corruption and scandal, culminating in the abuses of the oil-for-food program that Shawn says allowed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to purchase up to one billion dollars worth of conventional weapons—in defiance of resolutions passed by the U.N.'s own Security Council. "I wanted the American public to know that the U.N. has been unable to confront the gravest issues of our time," Shawn confided to Swirsky, "from terrorism to nuclear proliferation."

Some of the organization's most flagrant abuses, Shawn continues, can be seen in the extravagant expenditures that support the U.N.'s ambassadors—and in their disregard for local New York City laws. "The U.N. is a non-profit, humanitarian organization that provides one of the most elegant and expensive mansions for its C.E.O.," the author stated in an interview with Jamie Glazov for Frontpage Magazine. "I don't want to see the Secretary General out on the street, but why does the U.N. provide a mansion that [is] valued at nineteen million dollars? It actually is worth much more than that." "The diplomats voting on reform are also vested in maintaining a flawed system that has provided them with a life-style that is, to say the least, privileged and self-indulgent," Shawn told Glazov. "The highly praised reform plan has for now been largely torpedoed by the restive G-77 member states."

The fiscal sense of irresponsibility that Shawn decries in The U.N. Exposed is only part of a larger culture that cannot be trusted, the author states. Even reporters who cover the organization partake of this sense of entitlement, he says, some of them applying for jobs with the U.N. at the same time that they are charged with the responsibility of reporting about its actions. "The U.N. needs to establish standards of responsibility and accountability, from within and without," Shawn concluded in his interview with Glazov. "Unless reform is taken seriously, I am afraid that the organization will drift into irrelevancy beyond what we have already experienced." "All in all, Shawn builds an overwhelming case demonstrating what most of us already know—the U.N. is a failure in everything that it attempts—even reforming itself," stated a reviewer for the Center for Individual Freedom Web site. Furthermore, this reviewer stated, "Shawn's reporting is outstanding and comprehensive."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, October, 2006, Jed Babbin, review of The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World, p. 75.

New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, "Is the UN Doomed?," p. 45.