Clark Hoyt, the New York Times ombudsman, dedicates his latest column to a defense of the paper’s conduct in the affair of the kidnapping of David Rodhe, a New York Times journalist. Rodhe and one of his companions, an Afghan journalist, escaped and are now free.
I hadn’t heard of this affair, and that’s by design. In an effort to protect its employee, the NYT went to great lengths to suppress any mention of the kidnapping not only in its own pages, but elsewhere as well:
The Times went to extraordinary lengths to quash the Rohde story and to shape information that might be available to the kidnappers on the Internet. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was enlisted to keep word of the kidnapping off that site, even as user-editors tried to post it. Michael Yon, an independent journalist, posted an item on his blog in March and was quickly asked to take it down, which he did.
Michael Moss, a Times reporter, edited Rohde’s biography on Wikipedia to highlight his reporting that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims and to remove the fact that he once worked for The Christian Science Monitor. Moss wrote similar information on Rohde’s Times Topics page on the paper’s Web site. He and Catherine Mathis, the Times’s spokeswoman, even persuaded a group of New England newspapers to remove Rohde’s wedding notice and photos from their Web site so the kidnappers would not have personal information they could use to pressure him psychologically. I found this last action troubling because The Times takes a hard line against removing information from its own archive.
Much of the column is dedicated to an explanation of why the NYT was willing to go so far to protect its own, while simultaneously reporting on other middle eastern kidnappings, including a U.S. soldier. Hoyt claims that the NYT would be just as willing to protect others, if it had only been asked. Readers will decide for themselves how much they believe that.
It’s well and good that the NYT wanted to protect its people. But it’s important to note the flexibility of the NYT’s dedication to The Public’s Right To Know. When running a story would endanger people, the public’s right to know depends on who those people are.
(Via Hot Air.)
Internet Scofflaw 