Manu Raju Biography
Manu Raju is an American anchor and reporter working for CNN as an Anchor and Chief Congressional correspondent. He joined the CNN news team in September 2015, after previously working for The Hill and Politico.
Manu Raju Career
Raju’s first job was at WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin, on the assignment desk. In 2002, he moved to Washington, D.C. He got a job with Inside Washington Publishers there writing about environmental policy. His next jobs were at Congressional Quarterly, The Hill, and Politico, where he worked as a reporter for seven years before joining CNN in September 2015. Raju was a regular guest on many networks and shows before he joined CNN. He was on NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, among others. Erik Wemple of The Washington Post called our new hire a “towering get” for CNN when he was hired.
Raju is known for finding out what politicians are talking about behind closed doors. He broke big news during the government shutdown in 2013 and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s 2014 reelection campaign. Raju broke the news that McConnell’s opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes seemed to be getting an illegal campaign bus from her father. Her father was later sent to prison for violating campaign finance laws.
When Senator Marco Rubio ran for president in 2016, Raju was CNN’s main reporter following the campaign. He wrote a lot about how the GOP elite was fighting Donald Trump and made big news in important Senate races, like the one in New Hampshire. For his stories about important people in Washington, D.C., Raju was called the “King of the Hill” by India Abroad, the newspaper that put him on the cover that year. A former editor of Politico was reported as saying, “Raju is great at that inside-the-room reporting.” The article said Raju was “one of the very few Indian American journalists in such a prominent position in the mainstream media.”
Raju and Jeremy Herb wrote for CNN in 2017 that members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., had access to WikiLeaks papers that had been hacked before they were made public. It turned out that the news was false, so it was taken down. In a tweet, Trump Jr. said to Manu Raju, “I won’t hold my breath for an apology or for you to call out your puppet masters on the left who fed you BS knowing you would happily run with it without ever checking the other side.” Julian Assange disagreed with CNN’s story. However, CNN said it would not punish Raju because he had followed CNN’s rules for journalistic integrity.
Raju made a lot of news in January 2017 when he wrote about a stock trade that made people question Tom Price’s morals and legality as President Trump’s Health and Human Services candidate. The Trump administration asked for a retraction, but fact-checkers confirmed Raju’s story as true. Wemple praised Raju’s work on the story as “a model of careful and measured journalism.” Raju was on the air in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when the building was attacked. He reported on the events as they happened in real-time. CNN said in 2021 that Raju had been promoted to chief congressional reporter for the network.
According to CNN, Raju started hosting the Sunday version of Inside Politics in August 2023. He would also keep his job on Capitol Hill. Raju graduated from Hinsdale South High School in 1998. He got his degree in business management from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2002. While he was in college, Raju worked for The Badger Herald as the sports director.
Manu Raju Salary
Raju earns a salary of about $47,000-$120,000.
Manu Raju Net Worth
Raju has an estimated net worth of about $1 Million – $7 Million which he has earned through his career as an Anchor and Chief Congressional Correspondent.
Manu Raju Age
Raju was born on February 9, 1980, in Downers Grove, Illinois, United States. He is 44 years old as of 2023, and he celebrates his birthday on the 9th of February every year.
Manu Raju Height and Weight
Raju stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches tall (1.75m) and weighs 64 kgs (141 lbs)
Manu Raju Family
Raju was born in Downers Grove, Illinois, United States to
Tonse N. K. Raju (father), a neonatologist and formerly a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Vidya Raju (mother). In the 1970s, Raju’s parents moved to the United States from Karnataka, India. Both of them later worked at the National Institutes of Health. He has a grandfather named Gopalakrishna Adiga who was a poet from India who wrote in Kannada. Moreover, he was raised alongside a brother named Sharat Raju, a film and TV director.
Manu Raju Wife and Twins
Raju is married to Archana Mehta, an entrepreneur with the company AM Strategies. They first met in 2005 while living in Washington and they dated for a short time. The couple is blessed with twins; a boy Sonya Sushila Raju and a girl Sanjay Mehta Raju who were born in 2015.
Manu Raju Awards
Raju was one of four reporters who got the prestigious Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents Association in 2012 for their work covering the 2011 debt ceiling crisis while under a lot of time pressure. Raju won a Folio Eddie Award and first place from the Society of Professional Journalists in D.C. in 2015 for his beat coverage of the 2014 midterm elections. He also wrote a feature story on Senator Elizabeth Warren with another journalist. Washington Life magazine named Raju one of the “movers and shakers” under 40 in the city in 2015. He was put into the Hall of Fame for his high school, Hinsdale South, that same year.
When Raju was given the 2016 Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based reporting of Congressional and political events in 2017, it was for his work covering Congress and campaign politics. Moreover, at the 2017 Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, D.C., he was given the award. The host, Bobby Bones, praised his “tenacity” and “relentless” coverage. Judges gave Raju the prize for his article about how Senate candidates from both parties in New Hampshire struggled to support their party’s presidential nominee.
Manu Raju Social Media Platforms
Raju is very active on his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages. He has 638.3k followers on Twitter 22.3k followers on Instagram, and 8.8k followers on Facebook.