Howard Kurtz on the media silence over David Rohde’s abduction:
After the Italian news agency Adnkronos International reported the kidnapping, it was sporadically mentioned by such blogs as Little Green Footballs, the Jawa Report and Dan Cleary, Political Insomniac. Michael Yon, a former Green Beret, said from Thailand that he “sat on it” for months and in March “just did a small item because it was pretty much out there” online. “There’s no way I would’ve done that if I thought it increased his jeopardy.” Keller said the Times contacted such bloggers, and in each case, “they took it down,” as Yon did.
Well, no they did not:
Little Green Footballs, Michael Yon, Dan Cleary, and the Jawa Report all have posts about Rohde, dated between November and March. Yon, in particular, seems to have concluded that just because an Italian news agency wrote about it months before, it was okay to disrespect the wishes of Rohde’s family and coworkers for an exclusive. It’s much like conservative Ed Morrisey agonizing over whether a scoop was worth a liberal reporter’s life. After deliberating, he finally decides it is not.
Some background on why mentioning these bloggers might matter? Their commenters seem to a) blame Rohde for the editorial stance of his newspaper, as if he somehow deserved abduction because they feel some of his editors are too liberal; b) draw an equivalency between scooping an abduction and exposing illegal conduct like warrant-less wire tapping by the Bush administration; c) consider the New York Times hypocritical because when it published torture photos from Abu Ghraib it didn’t respect the lives of soldiers or something.
I am amazed at what partisan hatred has turned into in America. I don’t remember it being this bad under Clinton, despite the conspiracy theories about secret Hillary lesbianism and retirement-murders. It seems the rabid anti-Bush hatred of his first term in office has flipped sides or something. Just bizarre.
As for those blogs, it’s possible they put the posts back up after Rohde’s escape yesterday… but that doesn’t seem likely and they gave no indication about it one way or another. At least right now, it looks like the New York Times asked them not to post about Rohde’s abduction and they decided to anyway. Fabulous.
Meanwhile, I’m anxious to learn how he and his companion were able to find an Army scout so easily after escaping a Haqqani compound, and get flown to Bagram so quickly.
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Hey, I’m not saying that he deserved it or this is like Abu Ghraib, but the media in general will dime out anyone, any time for a story without regard to how it will affect the rest of the world. Sometimes you have to wonder if they do it SPECIFICALLY to cause problems in the world (which they will promptly and dutifully report to you live 24/7 beamed straight to your living room). “The people have the right to know!” they’ll claim, but as soon as its one of their own golden boys, we see a complete blackout of the story. I’m not saying they should have reported on the story because it would have given his captors exactly what they wanted; notoriety. It sure didn’t take them long to report a rocket attack and a BDA in wee hours of this morning (Afghan time) which will now encourage similar attacks on my current home. For the families of those killed and wounded, there is a need to know. For everyone else…how does this event affect their lives? It doesn’t. And reporting it puts my life in danger. But the media doesn’t care about my life, they only seem to care about their own.
Well, Fritz, I think you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. For starters: the attack was news, and the AP is not the only way militants gain notoriety. Simply by doing it and not getting caught, they gained stature. And being able to actually kill people inside Bagram—which like never happens otherwise (remember the really annoying “everyone please flee to your bunkers” warnings in March?)—is a pretty significant milestone about the security situation in Parwan, which is normally ignored because it’s so boring.
Now, if Rohde had been killed, then the story would have been all over the wires immediately. It made sense: when Piotr Stanczak, a Polish engineer surveying oil and gas fields near Peshawar, was abducted, the publicity around it quite probably gave his captors tremendous stature. Similarly, the killing of Daniel Pearl, which happened in 2002 despite great public outcry, gained his captors infamy as well. That’s not to say that lavishing international pressure on a situation is always a bad thing, but in Pakistan itself, internationals don’t always fare well in highly-publicized abduction cases (think of the South Korean missionaries who were beheaded in Ghazni just to prove their abductors “meant business”).
That being said, if you can point me to a case where the media publicized an operation in a way that endangered the lives of soldiers—excepting Geraldo Rivera—I’ll moderate my stance. But in Afghanistan we actually have several examples of reporters sitting on stories about things until after they’ve happened, specifically because military representatives have asked them to out of concern for the men (and women!) involved.
In other words, I don’t see this as a double-standard at all. In fact, it is pretty consistent.
WHAT A JOKE!!!
This story was covered up because Obama had just been elected days before the kidnapping, and this story would have clearly shown that the Islamic militants had no intention of changing their attitude toward our country even though we had elected Obama.
You and the press should be ashamed of yourselves for stating that your primary concern was the safety of Mr. Rohde. That’s completely untrue! Your primary concern was protecting the image of Obama and the false notion that a new attitude toward our enemy would somehow reduce tensions and create harmony between us. WHAT A JOKE!!!
Stop lying! We see right through it!
Face the damn fact that there are people in this world that want to kill us/remove us from the face of the earth! Playing nice with them does not work!
There have been several cases of aid workers as well as journalists being kidnapped in Afghanistan in the last few years and in nearly all cases (unless, for example, another person was killed in the abduction making it impossible not to report) there has been a media (and blogger) silence. These cases have been known about in-country, but no one would report them for fear of exacerbating the situation. To my mind this is normal, and correct, practice. No conspiracy and nothing sinister, just common sense and decency.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 06/22/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Rud’s right. There’s plenty of kidnappings going on that nobody reports, nobody bloggs about and to my knowledge, people don’t even include in their e-mails home as a part of chit chat.
I think people in general would be suprised to learn how much is held back by reporters and such, I speak of the folks that are over here, on the ground. It must be a sobering experience for some to be able to conect the dots of a story going to wire in , say the US, and the real impact it could, COULD, have on lives over here.
The military is most suspicious of the press, but I find that every one who has dealt with those brave or foolish enough to venture out into the scary parts to get the stories, all have a new found, if not begrudging affection and respect for the press. It has even come to the point now that those once who would never willingly accept a member of the press along on a mission or play host at a FOB are now asking that more and more press get out here because they have been doing a pretty spectacular job on reporting things that are either officialy ignored or deneyd.
For the record, my blogging on Rohde consisted of:
1. On November 11, I posted the news report from Italian news agency AKI, which I discovered via The Jawa Report. I made no commentary of my own.
2. On March 11, I noticed that Little Green Footballs and Michael Yon had brief updates on Rohde, so I linked to them on my blog. I also mentioned in my post that I had contacted another blogger via email a few weeks earlier and learned from that person that the Times had indeed issued a media gag on the story, out of concern for Rohde’s safety – which I found entirely appropriate and sensical.
So that was it, until news broke last week of Rohde’s escape. Now, I am no fan of the NYT and think it is completely hypocritical of them to keep this story under wraps, after exposing wiretap programs related to national security during the Bush administration. That said, I never got into any of that on my blog. I will say that I am fine with the Times keeping the Rohde’s kidnapping quiet – I just wish they had done the same with the wiretap story.
Incidentally, my blog generally draws very little traffic (in between occasional Instalanches), so I can usually tell from a cursory Sitemeter analysis what is getting people to my blog. Between November and now, I could tell there were a lot of people out there googling “David Rohde kidnapping” or “David Rohde Taliban” so I don’t think it was much of a secret that he had been kidnapped by the Taliban.
Also, Bill Keller never contacted me. My blog is small potatoes so maybe he just didn’t feel it was necessary (even though, as I said, people were getting to my blog just by googling Rohde). But I’d have happily deleted the November and March posts if he asked me to, or taken them down myself if I thought it was in any way making Rohde’s situation worse (I’m echoing Michael Yon’s comments here).
I am extremely glad that David Rohde is OK – I thought for sure this would not end well for him – and look forward to learning more details of his ordeal and how he escaped.
Dan, thanks for clearing that up. Howard Kurtz left the impression that Bill Keller or a subordinate had contacted you to take the post down. I don’t know about the others, though I remain deeply uncomfortable with the language surrounding the accusations of the Times’ “hypocrisy.”
Look, if they blabbed about other abductions and created a media firestorm that resulted in people getting hurt or killed… well, that would be hypocrisy. Publishing details of a program that was illegal at the time (though I believe it should still be illegal to tap my phone without a warrant), and has since been proven not just ineffective but a tool for the agents involved to spy on their wives, well, that’s really not hypocrisy.
You may think that the NYT remains in the wrong for exposing that program—which is fine. But even the law Congress passed tacitly admitted that until they authorized it, it was illegal (or at the very least highly improper) to tap American phones without warrants.
This is what is so galling about the comparison: exposing a potentially illegal government program is not in the slightest morally equivalent to requesting quiet and temperance over a high-profile abduction.
Thanks for your comments, Joshua. We obviously have a disagreement on the ‘hypocrisy’ thing, but mainly I just wanted to stipulate that I was not contacted by Keller. It was a story I came across on the ‘net, found interesting, and so I linked to the sources on my blog. I would have deleted the posts if Keller (or anyone else, for that matter) asked me to so.
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