Opinion
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Whose side is the New York Times on?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
06/22/09 7:29 PM EDT
The New York Times has revealed that its reporter David Rohde was kidnapped and held by terrorists in Afghanistan for seven months and that it and, at its request, other media refrained from reporting this to protect Rohde’s safety. The story has come out only after Rohde was rescued by American forces. Here is the Times’s explanation for covering up this story.
“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. The kidnappers initially said as much,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times. “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.”
To which I’m inclined to say, good for the Times and for all those, including conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, who kept the lid on this story.
But the Times of course did not take the same approach when it published its December 2005 story on NSA surveillance of communications between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States and its June 2006 story on the entirely legal Swift surveillance of terrorist financing.
Bill Keller was a wonderful reporter, whose coverage of the downfall of the apartheid system in South Africa and the downfall of Communism in Russia deserved all the awards he received. He’s a fine writer and was a thoughtful and interesting columnist for a couple of years early in this decade. But his decisions and those of his colleagues at the Times indicate pretty clearly whose side they are on. They are determined to protect their brave and admirable colleagues from danger. But they are not concerned to protect the people of the United States and friendly nations from dangers which, while perhaps more remote, have proved painfully real, and not only on September 11, 2001. They seem to see themselves as transnational journalists, with responsibilities to their colleagues and their profession, but with no particular responsibilities as American citizens.
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