Posted on 01/09/2006 12:51:04 PM PST by NativeNewYorker
The abduction of a Christian Science Monitor reporter in Iraq on Saturday was not disclosed by major U.S. media outlets for nearly two days after the Monitor requested that the incident, and the reporter's name and affiliation, be withheld. A translator was killed in the incident and the reporter, now identified by the Monitor as Jill Carroll, is still being held.
Numerous foreign news outlets and several leading wire services disclosed the incident--and in a few cases, the reporter's name. Such stories did not appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other U.S. papers and their Web sites.
The Associated Press ran at least one story out of Baghdad, but without the newspaper or reporter's name, and it did not appear in any major newspapers Sunday or Monday. AP held off all further reports at the request of the Monitor, which did not release the information until this afternoon. Jay Jostyn, a Monitor spokesman, told E&P it acted now--sending an email to news organizations after 2:30 p.m. and with a story on its Web site at 3:00 P.M.--because the story had by now circulated via 40 to 50 outlets abroad.
The Monitor revealed that the reporter, Jill Carroll, is a stringer for the paper who has written many stories for the newspaper for about a year, the last four or five months reporting from Iraq.
"We have been advised that the less that is said, the better," Jostyn told E&P this morning, before a Monitor story about the abduction was posted. "If she is not telling her captors she is a reporter and there is a story out there that she is, we need to be sensitive to that."
Jostyn said the request for a news blackout was made in an effort to protect her safety. The Monitor's own story about the abduction, and a related editor's note, did not mention the news blackout. It mentioned that her family had urged her captors to release her. "We just felt it [the blackout] is not something we wanted to publicize," he said.
Several editors at major news outlets earlier today said they were glad to oblige and hoped their efforts would help win Carroll's release.
Marjorie Miller, foreign editor at the Los Angeles Times, said she was contacted on Saturday after one of her Baghdad correspondents was asked by the Monitor to hold off on a story about the abduction. She said she reviewed the matter with Managing Editor Doug Frantz and the story never ran. "If the feeling of the organization is that it will endanger the life of the victim, we don't want to do anything that will endanger the life of the victim," she told E&P. "They asked us not to do it for the purpose of negotiations."
"I am doing everything I possibly can not to endanger a reporter's life and we are trying to gauge what to do," said David Hoffman, assistant managing editor for foreign at the Washington Post, who declined to comment specifically on the requested blackout. "We are trying not to endanger a reporter."
A Google search reveals that USA Today's Web site apparently carried an AP story about the abduction on Saturday--and then killed the link.
In a story that it moved after 3 p.m. today, The AP said, "After initial reports of the kidnapping on Saturday, The Associated Press and other news organizations honored a request from the newspaper in Boston and a journalists' group in Baghdad for a news blackout. The request was made to give authorities an opportunity to resolve the incident during the early hours after the abduction."
Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of AP, said the news service had posted a story about the kidnapping Saturday, which did not include the name of the reporter or her employer because they might not have been known at the time. (That story, and others, identified the victim as a female American.) AP was then contacted through its Baghdad bureau and asked not to post any further stories.
"When somebody approaches us and says we might be able to affect some change, we entertain the request and comply if we are able," she told E&P. "It has been not uncommon in the past for news organizations and other companies to make requests to hold off reporting for a short time if they think it would help recover a kidnapped individual."
The Los Angles Times' Miller also indicated such requests have occurred before, on an ad hoc basis, and the paper is now "figuring out" a policy on how to respond.
A spokesperson at the New York Times did not immediately confirm or deny that the paper had been contacted, but was looking in to the matter. Foreign editors at The Boston Globe, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal could not be reached Monday.
Jill Carroll's ties to a paper with "Christian" in the title was also a likely concern when dealing with Islamic fundamentalists, noted one editor who had agreed not to publish a story on the incident. "That could put her life more in danger," the editor said.
"Jill is an established journalist who has been reporting from the Middle East for Jordanian, Italian, and other news organizations over the past three years," the Monitor wrote in a story to be published on Tuesday. "In recent months, The Monitor has tapped into her professionalism, energy, and fair reporting on the Iraq scene. It was her drive to gather direct and accurate views from political leaders that took her into western Baghdad's Adil neighborhood on Saturday morning."
E&P, which received no request to withhold coverage, on Sunday published online a story about the abduction, without mentioning her name or affiliation, based on accounts from AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP and several British newspapers.
Another newspaper asks to protect ONE of its reporters, and the shoe is on the other foot...
Huh? If they are honoring the request to keep it hush-hush, then why are they blabbing about it?
Soldiers, on the other hand.....
You gotta point.
It is OK to save one reporter but not millions of Americans.
No kidding.
Excuse me while I puke at the hypocrisy.
If the Times reported that the terrorists have captured, and will probably kill, a female reporter, it would tend to give the terrorists a negative image ... and we can't have that now can we.
It's called professional courtesy -- for the media's allies in the War on Terror, the terrorists.
No blackout on FR on the story this weekend...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553555/posts
the internet routes around censorship...
"News is what your Editor says it is unless the Publisher says it isn't."
Carl Liberto, Managing Editor of the now defunct Shreveport (LA) Journal
A young, 20 something, female, white, liberal reporter...
Bingo!
They knew they should probably be hush-hush, but since it might make President Bush look bad, they went ahead with the story.
American soldiers are looking for her...
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L0976087.htm
This was the first I saw of this being reported, and I remember being skeptical it was even true.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1553588/posts
Posted on 01/07/2006 5:16:55 AM PST by ferri
The story was reported in todays Boston Herald or NY Post, can not remember which as I read them early this morning.
They did not mention her name or who she was reporting for.
They shot her driver dead and abducted her was all the story said.
"I saw a group of people coming as if they had come from the sky," recalled Ms. Carroll's driver, who survived the attack. "One guy attracted my attention. He jumped in front of me screaming, 'Stop! Stop! Stop!' with his left hand up and a pistol in his right hand."
When five or six men, including a large, mustachioed man with short hair waving a Glock handgun, stopped Carroll's car, the driver said he thought the men were from Dulaimi's security detail, so he slowed down.
The kidnapping occurred within 300 yards of the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, a prominent Sunni politician, whom Carroll had been intending to interview at 10 a.m. Saturday local time, the driver said.
Mr. Dulaimi, however, turned out not to be at his office, and after 25 minutes, Carroll and her interpreter left. Their car was stopped as she drove away. "It was very obvious this was by design," said the driver. "The whole operation took no more than a quarter of a minute. It was very highly organized. It was a setup, a perfect ambush."
So the paper wants to protect it's reporter......as it should. But has no problem at all jeopardising our soldiers every chance it gets!
Since the terrorists know they have her, I fail to see the reason for the secrecy.
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