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Escape From Taliban Was “Suicide Mission”

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David Rohde, a New York Times reporter captured last fall by the Taliban, interviewed residents of the Helmand region of Afghanistan in 2007. Rohde and local reporter Tahir Ludin escaped on Friday. (Credit: Tomas Munita, courtesy of the New York Times.)

40 Outlets Kept Silent During Journalists’ Captivity

"They played game after game of draughts," or checkers, "with their Taleban captors until the men became drowsy, then made their big move," Tom Coghlan reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, for Monday’s editions of the Times of London.¬†

"With the gunmen asleep on the floor beside them, the two hostages crept to the window, dropped a length of old rope they had hidden during months of captivity, shimmied down and raced to freedom.

"The extraordinary escape of a Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist and his Afghan translator from Islamic militants was described yesterday for the first time." Their driver, who was also captured, did not escape with his colleagues.

"David Rohde, 41, a New York Times reporter, and Tahir Luddin, 34, an Afghan journalist who has worked for The Times for several years, fled after being held for seven months in a lawless region in northwest Pakistan described as ‘the most dangerous place on Earth’ by US officials and a haven for al-Qaeda and the Taleban," Coghlan continued, using an alternative spelling for Taliban.

"Mr Luddin told how they sneaked past sleeping guards at the Taleban prison near the town of Miram Shah after tiring out the men with repeated games of draughts. He described the attempt as a ‘suicide mission’ that he felt was almost certainly doomed to fail. But after months in captivity the pair believed that they would be killed if they did make a bid for freedom."

[In the New York Times, Adam B. Ellick added in a story from Kabul, "Mr. Ludin said that he and Mr. Rohde had been threatened with death by their captors. The past two to three months were so ‘hopeless,’ Mr. Ludin said, that he considered committing suicide with a large knife. Mr. Rohde, who was reuniting with his family on Sunday, confirmed the accuracy of Mr. Ludin’s account but declined to comment further. "]

Howard Kurtz wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post, "There were times during the kidnapping ordeal of New York Times reporter David Rohde when his boss wavered in his determination to suppress the story.

"’We agonized over it at the outset and, periodically, over the last seven months,’ Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday. ‘Of all the subjects we discussed with the family, that was the one we discussed more intensively than any other: Should we change strategy and go public?’

"Keller decided against it, and he was aided by silence from at least 40 major news organizations – including, after a personal appeal, al-Jazeera – that continued until yesterday, when the Times confirmed that Rohde and an assistant had escaped their Taliban captors in Pakistan. Keller consulted not only government experts but also other news organizations that had been through similar experiences, and there was ‘a pretty firm consensus,’ he said, ‘that you really amp up the danger when you go public. . . . It makes us cringe to sit on a news story,’ but in a life-or-death situation, ‘the freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.’

"Still, the unusual arrangement raises questions about whether journalists were giving special treatment to one of their own."

 

 

Britain’s Channel 4 reports on speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At Least 24 Journalists, Bloggers Arrested in Iran

"Iranian authorities have arrested at least 24 journalists and bloggers since postelection protests began a week ago, and a media watchdog says reporters are a ‘priority target’ for Iran’s leadership," Angela Charlton reported from Paris Sunday for the Associated Press.

"Among those detained were the head of the Association of Iranian Journalists and a Canadian reporter for Newsweek. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent has been ordered to leave the country.

"’It’s becoming more and more problematic for journalists,’ said Benoit Hervieu of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, also known by its French acronym RSF.

"The group released the names of 23 Iranian journalists, editors and bloggers arrested since June 14, and says it has lost contact with several others believed detained or in hiding. Hervieu said RSF verified each arrest via its network of reporters and activists in Iran.

"Newsweek said in a statement later that its correspondent Maziar Bahari, a Canadian citizen, was detained without charge Sunday morning and has not been heard from since. Newsweek defended his coverage of Iran as ‘fair and nuanced’ and called for his release."

"The BBC’s Jon Leyne has been ordered to leave the country, a BBC spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with company policy.

"The Fars news agency said Sunday that Leyne will have to leave Iran within 24 hours, and that Iranian officials have accused him of ‘dispatching fabricated news and reports, ignoring neutrality in news, supporting rioters and trampling the Iranian nation’s rights.’

"Ali Mazroui, the head of the Association of Iranian Journalists, was arrested Sunday morning, RSF said. Overnight, husband-and-wife Bahaman Ahamadi Amoee and Jila Baniyaghoob were arrested by plainclothes officers who searched their home, RSF said.

"Baniyaghoob edits a news Web site that focuses on women’s rights, and her husband writes for various pro-reform publications.

"Others detained include a blogger known as the ‘Blogging Mullah,’ a cartoonist, a TV producer, the publisher of several newspapers, a disabled former newspaper editor and a business reporter."

June 19, 2009

Leukemia Claims Ex-Nashville Columnist

Tim Ch?°vez Was Bitter About Treatment by Gannett

Tim Ch?°vez, a former columnist at the Nashville Tennessean whose job was eliminated while he was out on disability fighting leukemia, succumbed to the disease Thursday night, his wife, former Tennessean reporter Kathrin Ch?°vez, told colleagues on Friday. He was 50.

"It was so peaceful. He stopped breathing, then took a couple of very light last breaths, and then drifted off. There was no struggle, no pain," she said. Ch?°vez was taken from Vanderbilt University Hospital to a Nashville hospice a day before he died, said the Rev. Joseph Patrick Breen, who is conducting the funeral service.

Ch?°vez was diagnosed with leukemia in late 2005 and eventually had to stop writing his column. When the doctor told him in 2007 that chemotherapy treatments had worked well enough for him to return to work, he contacted the paper, Journal-isms wrote at the time. Ch?°vez said the Tennessean informed him his job had been eliminated.

"I gave 14 years to the company," Ch?°vez said, speaking of Gannett, which owns the Tennessean. "They didn’t say, ‘thank you for your years of service’ . . . never did contact me and see how I was feeling or anything. It’s just them taking advantage of my [situation]."

In a blog item in December, Ch?°vez continued his criticism of the company. "From my 10 years at The Tennessean, one of the most depressing things I noticed besides the incompetence of the top newsroom managers was the lack of a black journalism legacy at a newspaper located in a city with prominent African-American population and history.

"And in a state that gave the nation the late great Ida B. Wells. God rest her courageous soul."

Ch?°vez went on to create his blog, Political Salsa, to write for the Williamson Herald in Franklin, Tenn., and to contribute to the Hispanic Link News Service.

"He brought to Hispanic Link syndication service a perspective that we didn’t have enough of," Charlie Ericksen, who founded the service, told Journal-isms. "He came from the South," where Latinos "were the new kid on the block. Everything was black and white before that. He added an element that a lot of people ‚Äî including blacks ‚Äî seemed to have trouble dealing with."

Ch?°vez arrived at the Tennessean in 1996 after working at the Guthrie (Okla.) Daily Leader, the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City and the Utica (N.Y.) Observer-Dispatch, his wife said.

He was an unconventional columnist, Sandra Roberts, retired editorial page editor at the Tennessean, said. "He was the most passionate journalist I ever worked with. There were days when he would infuriate me and there were others when his columns would delight me. He wasn’t easily categorized."

Among the honors given the Kansas native was the 2001 Will Rogers Humanitarian of the Year Award, bestowed by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists for column writing that benefited the community.

"While most of us believed in keeping a distance from those we wrote about, Tim believed in totally embracing them, and rolling up his sleeves and working with the kids directly," Roberts said, speaking of inner-city youth. "He saw journalism in a different way. You write about these kids and then you go shoot hoops with them, and then you write about them some more."

Ch?°vez unsuccessfully wanted to publish the home telephone numbers of officials he was criticizing, she said.

Ch?°vez was pro-life and deeply religious. Some questioned the authenticity of his expressed political leanings. When he began his blog in 2008, fellow blogger Bill Hobbs, former communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party and former Tennessean staffer, wrote, "the former regime at The Tennessean pretended he was a ‘conservative,’ in order to tamp down complaints that all of the paper’s local columnists were liberal."

In a 2003 column, Ch?°vez ridiculed fellow Tennessean Al Gore. "Al Gore is reportedly working on starting a liberal cable TV network. Isn’t there already CNN (also known as the Clinton News Network), ABC, NBC and CBS? Here are the shows already in production for Al-TV:

"Beard Care 101.

"Me and My Lockbox.

"The PTL Club: Praise The Liberal."

Services are planned for 2 p.m. Monday at St. Edward Catholic Church, 188 Thompson Lane in Nashville, with visitation from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Tortured Gambian Writer Living "Normal Life" in U.S.

A journalist from the Gambia, West Africa, has been living "a normal life" in Grand Rapids, Mich., after 22 days of detention in his home country that "included three nights of systematic physical and mental torture that left scars all over my body as well as my hand broken in three places."

Musa Saidykhan told his first-person story Friday on the Web site of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"I had been a journalist for a decade in the Gambia without a brush with the government until June 2001, when I and 11 other colleagues threw in the towel at the Daily Observer newspaper after the government attempted to interfere with our editorial policy. I still practiced until April 2005 when I was appointed the editor-in-chief of The Independent, a biweekly paper known for being outspoken. The unsolved December 2004 assassination of a leading Gambian journalist, Deyda Hydara, by then had virtually paralyzed independent journalism and created an editorial vacuum.

". . . A trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2005 to attend the African Editor’s Forum, where I handed over a petition to the country’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, expressing concern about our volatile media environment, was the beginning of my trouble. I was arrested by security agents who interrogated me, questioned my nationality, and accused me of being a traitor."

A foiled coup provided the Gambian government the opportunity to detain him, Saidykhan wrote. Authorities "finally bowed to Thabo Mbeki’s threats of not only boycotting the African Union Summit in The Gambia, but also withholding his country’s more than monetary contribution to the summit. I decided to flee the country with my wife three weeks after my release, for security and medical reasons. All the doctors I had approached refused to examine me, let alone treat me. One doctor gave me painkillers and asked me to leave. ‘Who knows whether my office is being monitored right now,’ he said.

"We spent two and a half years in Dakar, Senegal, amid insecurity and nostalgia. Four months later, the African Editor’s Forum contracted me to do research on Africa’s restrictive media laws for four months. In the same October, afrol News Agency named me the head of their West Africa department.

"We were resettled in the United States — in Michigan — on November 4, 2008, and have been living a normal life, though freezing temperatures and several inches of snow have taken a great toll on us. Our resettlement process was smooth, especially with the help of our agency and its sponsors who network us with people in all walks of life. I have yet to start working in journalism again."

President Obama’s office called Parade magazine a week before its deadline, asking if he could write for Father’s Day. (Credit: Parade)

No Panic, the President Wants to Bump the Cover Story

"Parade’s Father’s Day issue, which includes President Barack Obama’s third appearance as a writer for the magazine, was not originally planned that way," Joe Strupp reported for Editor & Publisher.

"Editors had initially had a story about Bob Woodruff written by his wife, Lee, for the June 21 cover. But when Obama’s office called less than a week before deadline asking if he could write for Father’s Day, Editor Janice Kaplan says they couldn’t say no.

"’It came out of David Axelrod’s office,’ Kaplan recalled. She said the magazine closes each issue two and-a-half weeks before it is distributed. That meant the June 21 issue had a deadline of Wed., June 3.

"Kaplan said the president’s request came in six days before, on Thurs., May 28. She told his office that the piece had to be in within two days. ‘We said we would need the story by Saturday,’ she said, adding that he made the deadline. ‘It wasn’t a panic once we knew and we had the story ready to go.’"

Critic Says Obama Will Lose by Criticizing Fox

"When is Barack Obama going to learn that presidents shouldn’t play press critic? It didn’t work for Richard Nixon. It didn’t work for Bill Clinton or George W. Bush," media writer Jeff Bercovici wrote Thursday for AOL’s dailyfinance.com. "It didn’t help John McCain win the White House, and it won’t help Obama, who vented his frustration with Fox News during an interview on CNBC yesterday.

"’I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,’ Obama told John Harwood, who had asked him how he felt about coverage of his administration. ‘That’s a pretty big megaphone. You’d be hard-pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.’

"Fox News (which Obama pettishly declined to name) is indeed a big megaphone ‚Äî big and getting bigger. And that’s no accident. As I’ve written before, Fox is big because it speaks to an audience that doesn’t feel its concerns represented elsewhere on TV (and, yes, because Roger Ailes is a pro at producing slick, loud, button-pressing programming in general). For Obama to turn his back on that audience because he doesn’t feel like he gets a fair shake from Fox would be a mistake. He all but acknowledged that himself during the campaign, when he finally granted an interview to Bill O’Reilly after being hounded for months.

"That’s not to say Obama has no grounds for complaint. . . "

Philly’s Anglo Papers Slammed for Ignoring Libel Story

"Personal rivalries have spiraled into defamation at a Spanish-language newspaper in Philadelphia. In April, Al D??a, the area’s largest-circulation Latino community paper, paid out $210,000 after losing a libel suit to former city solicitor Kenneth Trujillo. It’s a big story with implications for Philly’s media community — but you wouldn’t know it if you relied on the English-language press," Daniel Denvir wrote Monday in Columbia Journalism Review.

"Trujillo sued Al D??a and its publisher, Hernan Guaracao, after the paper ran a series of articles in 2006 alleging improprieties in Trujillo‚Äôs election as chairman of the city‚Äôs Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The March 12, 2006 cover story, for example, ran with the headline ‘Broken Trust’ ‚Äî in English ‚Äî and a photograph of Trujillo shattered like a windowpane. The English-language title was perceived to be an effort to damage Trujillo‚Äôs reputation amongst his non-Latino colleagues, people who would normally be unable or disinclined to read a Spanish-language newspaper.

"The offending articles read like editorials, ominously suggesting that various sources had knowledge of a ‘guiding hand’ behind the ‘supposed election.’ . . .

"The jury found that Al D??a’s suggestion that Trujillo was elected improperly was untrue.

"What’s newsworthy here is not the gossip of a rivalry amongst the wealthy and powerful, but the abuse of a community institution that at least 56,253 (Al D??a’s circulation) Latinos depend on each week — and the fact that most of the English- and Spanish-language press ignored the story from the moment the articles were published all the way up to the jury decision.

"The affair provides a cautionary tale on the role newspapers play within ethnic or minority-language communities: papers like Al D??a offer invaluable reporting on issues undercovered in the English-language press, and build community among people navigating the complexities of life in a new and foreign country. But all media outlets, ethnic or not, have the responsibility to ensure that the news is not hijacked by the powerful for the prosecution of arcane personal vendettas."

Jailed Journalists’ Station Still Trying to Find Niche

"Vanguard, the program that jailed journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling work for at San Francisco-based Current TV, has a simple mission: to tell stories the mainstream media are not," Gina Kim wrote Wednesday for the Sacramento Bee.

"’While other networks are cutting back on their international and investigative journalism efforts, we’re doing the opposite,’ the Vanguard Web page says.

"The two Americans were at the border of China and North Korea on March 17 to report on the trafficking of women there when they were arrested by North Korean police and inadvertently propelled into the international spotlight.

"Vanguard, Ling’s brainchild, is ‘one of the last best places in journalism,’ said Daniel Beckmann, managing director of Schmooru, a freelance journalists’ and filmmakers’ cooperative.

"’Current TV doesn’t go to North Korea to do a dangerous story for the sake of doing a dangerous story,’ Beckmann said. ‘Laura was the one who would approve stories and make sure there was a budget for them. . . . And her thought process was, ‘What is the value of what I’m going to do there?’

"Stories have highlighted kidnappings in oil-rich Nigeria, the Mexican drug war, the risks taken by Somali refugees and lessons that can be learned from this recession.

"Vanguard is one part of what Current TV hoped to do when it launched in August 2005 as the multimedia platform of the future," founded by former vice president Al Gore and low-cost legal service entrepreneur Joel Hyatt. "But even with an Emmy award for outstanding creative achievement in interactive television, the fledgling station is still trying to find its niche."

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