The New York Times managed to keep Gawker quiet on a story
Why Did Nobody Pick Up The David Rohde Kidnapping Story?
As mentioned earlier: New York Times reporter David Rohde managed to escape his Taliban captors to freedom last night by hopping over a wall. He was imprisoned for seven months. How wasn’t this widely reported? Even by us? Simple:
The New York Times managed it with expert precision and a delicate hand. In their release, Times managing editor Bill Keller noted that “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. 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.” So did the Times explicitly ask news organizations to simply not report the story for the safety of their writers?
Part of me wants to believe that these other news sources were just being decent and considerate of someone in a bad situation. Realistically, though, I think most of them didn’t want to suffer the PR backlash of being the ones who published the story and got the guy killed.