Seven months ago, David Rohde of the New York Times went to interview a Taliban leader in Afghanistan and didn't come back. He had been taken prisoner, long with two Afghan colleagues
Rohde and one of his colleagues escaped Saturday from his captors' clutches in North Waziristan, Pakistan, so as with CBC's Melissa Fung, his story can now be told.
Mr. Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, was abducted outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 10 while he was researching a book.
Mr. Rohde was part of The Times’s reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.
Mr. Rohde told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that Mr. Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
“They just walked over the wall of the compound,” Ms. Mulvihill said.
The driver, Mr. Mangal, did not escape with the other two men. The initial report was that Mr. Rohde was in good health, while Mr. Ludin injured his foot in the escape.
Until now, the kidnapping has been kept quiet by The Times and other media organizations out of concern for the men’s safety.
“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. “The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”
Gawker has a post on Rohde, noting in part that he managed to get himself out despite the institutional weight of the NYT.
Editor and Publisher has a brief story on the ethics of reporting such cases (quick version: It's tricky, but you should be fair, consistent and value human life).
Fung was freed on Nov. 8, 2008 (here's one of my early posts). Here's a blog search link if you want to revisit my Fung archives.
The debate around to report or not report appears to be the same in both cases.
Toronto Star public editor Kathy English columnized about consistent standards in these cases, given that the Star acceded to the Fung blackout but reported on a Canadian man being held by the North Korean government, even though the man's family had begged the paper not to run the story:
There are significant differences between Fung's kidnapping by bandits and the jailing of a Canadian by a sovereign state. Still, I've been troubled by the reality that the Star disregarded this family's request to suppress that news, yet agreed to the CBC's request to a news blackout about Fung. In both instances, a strong case was made that reporting could endanger a life. Is that a double standard? How will we handle such requests in the future?
In fact, the Star has no clear policy to guide reporters and editors
here. With Canada now at war in Afghanistan, and kidnappings on the rise there
and in other global terror zones, Kuntz, who was not consulted about the Kim
case, agrees we do need an immediate policy. And while no policy can cover the
many factors to be weighed in judging whether to publish or suppress a news
story, at the very least, when someone's life is at stake, the editor-in-chief
should be consulted.
I wonder if the Star now has such a policy.