Nieman Foundation<\/a>\u2019s annual Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture on Thursday (Feb. 4), New York Times correspondent David Rohde described his kidnapping within a wider context of increased threats to journalists who are now less likely to be seen as neutral observers by violent fundamentalists.<\/p>\n\u201cBoth what I found in the tribal areas and having that unfortunate kidnapping showed me the importance more than ever of the need for journalistic institutions that can send people out to do irreplaceable reporting on the ground and also support reporters if they\u2019re kidnapped,\u201d Rohde said.<\/p>\n
The Internet\u2019s instant platform has lured young journalists overseas, but \u201cif something goes wrong, those journalists don\u2019t have the backing of major institutions. I was lucky in my case; I did have that backing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rohde was a seasoned reporter when he accepted an invitation to interview a Taliban leader in November 2008, just an hour outside Kabul. He had covered the Balkans conflict and had won a Pulitzer for describing the mass execution of 7,000 Bosnian Muslims. He won a second Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a New York Times team that covered Afghanistan and Pakistan. He returned to Afghanistan to work on a book.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, he said, he should have realized that his kidnapping had long been planned. In harrowing detail, he described his captivity, including his young, fanatical Afghan and Pakistani guards who, through a lack of education and fervor, lived in an \u201calternative reality\u201d in which America was waging war against Islam, neckties were a secret symbol of Christianity, and Christians sought to live for 1,000 years \u2014 which revealed their lack of faith in God.<\/p>\n
Even though the United States had a policy against paying ransom, his captors believed that the U.S. government would be willing to shell out millions and release Islamic prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to gain Rohde\u2019s release. When he tried to tell them about being held captive by Christian fundamentalists for his work exposing Muslim executions, his captors simply concluded they could get even more money for him.<\/p>\n
While his captors had beliefs far outside mainstream Islam, he found that the Taliban were able to openly control large areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, creating a \u201cTaliban mini-state\u201d with their own police patrols, schools, and road construction crews.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I realized very quickly in Pakistan was that the Taliban regime that the United States thought it had toppled in 2001 was alive and thriving; it had simply moved a few miles to the east,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Yet mainstream Afghans and Pakistanis do not necessarily support the Taliban. \u201cThe Taliban are oppressive when they rule,\u201d he said, describing several executions. The only way to defeat them, however, is to destroy their safe havens in Pakistan, he said.<\/p>\n
The Times and other media did not report Rohde\u2019s kidnapping; he managed to escape in June 2009. He freely admitted that the news blackout raised troubling questions about favoritism for kidnapped journalists when others, such as contractors, are also nabbed.<\/p>\n
During a lively question-and-answer period, Shankar Vedantam, a Nieman Fellow and Washington Post reporter, noted that many crime or kidnapping victims also prefer that \u201cwe don\u2019t write about them at all, but we choose to write about them because we say it\u2019s in the public interest.\u201d\u00a0 He added that many governments believe intense media coverage encourages terrorism.\u00a0 \u201cHow do you wrestle with it?\u201d he asked Rohde.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot very well,\u201d Rohde acknowledged. He said he even has qualms about describing his captors, saying the Taliban may love to be perceived by Westerners as fanatical and greedy. \u201cThey want to be seen as irrational, they want to be terrifying,\u201d he said. \u201cI wrestle with whether I serve their purposes in writing their story. I don\u2019t have a good answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rohde, who wrote a five-part Times series on his kidnapping, is on leave writing his book and working to help news organizations and families deal with kidnapping and to promote training for reporters in hostile areas. \u201cI hope to help other journalists avoid the mistakes I made,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The annual Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture honors a Los Angeles Times reporter who was killed in 1979 while covering the Iranian revolution. For more information about the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Never has the path of international journalism been more perilous, says a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who was held captive by the Taliban for seven months in the mountainous tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the Nieman Foundation\u2019s annual Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture on Thursday (Feb. 4), New York Times correspondent David Rohde […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}