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? Yeah: that's actually exactly what happened. According to a comment left by Gawker's managing editor Gabriel Snyder on the earlier post, two things of pretty fascinating substance: (1) "it had been widely known in the Times newsroom and media circles almost as soon as he was taken hostage," which, even with their reporter's life on the line, is surprising given the fact that there was virtually nothing heard regarding this story and (2) Gabriel had contacted the Times regarding a piece on the kidnapping. The Times - or specifically - Cathrine Mathis, SVP of Communications at The New York Times Co., emailed Gabriel to ask that Gawker not run the story out of safety for their reporter's life. "Put that way, it was hard not to agree," Snyder writes. And that's why it happened: the competing obligation between having to write the news and being sensitive to a possibly fatal situation. And the Times, thankfully, chose Rohde's life. They also did an unbelievable job at shutting down the story elsewhere. So who did report on David Rohde's kidnapping? Combat reporter Michael Yon asked about it while embedded in Iraq: "In December, during a trip with Secretary Gates, I asked a New York Times reporter if she knew the status of the situation. The story had been kept so quiet that she didn't actually know the kidnapping had occurred. The information came to me from several sources some weeks after the kidnapping in Afghanistan. I sat on the information, but there are a growing number of snippets on the web..." A conservative American blog called Infidels Are Cool linked to Italian wire service AKI's story on it. Conservative forum/quasi-hate mongers Free Republic did a little dance on it. Sensing a pattern? What's out there around the time of the kidnapping are things like that: fringe reports. Meanwhile, Gabriel brings up an interesting final point: while the Times has every resource to understand and execute strategies regarding sensitive issues like this one, he (A) walked over a wall - Rodhe's words, and (B) the Times ran an... MORE >>
Iran Going Totally Batshit For The Second Weekend In A Row
Here we go again - Iran's utterly losing it as you read this, and it's way, way worse this time: there's a potential world leader ready for martyrdom, shooting deaths, more rioting, and a possible national strike. Scheduled demonstrations today, many in favor of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prime opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, have turned absolutely, completely bloody. Since there's so much to cover, we're just gonna do a point by point: A suicide bomber supposedly attacked the entrance to the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Some reports indicate that one person was killed, and two were injured, but BBC's Jon Leyne, in Tehran, thinks it's a lie put out by Iran's state media. If Leyne's right, they're reporting the event and inflating the numbers in order to enrage supporters of conservative Iranians who supported Khomeini. Khomeini was the Supreme Leader of Iran until his death in June of 1989. The current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a hard-line statement yesterday that there would be bloodshed if the protests in Iran continued. His exact quote: "The existence of extremism in a society means each extremist move fans another extremist move. If the political elite want to put the law under foot ... they are the ones responsible for the bloodshed, the violence and rioting." Excerpts from his speech are here. Moussavi supporters set fire to a building in Tehran used by supporters of Ahmadinejad. It's been reported - not Twittered, a distinction beginning to get really important in all of this - that Moussavi's supporters have been dispatched by water cannons, brute force via batons, tear gas, and in several instances, live rounds in Tehran. A BBC reporter has seen a black plume of smoke coming up from the center of the city. Moussavi has, in a letter to the Supreme Council that was re-posted to his website, demanded the election be annulled due to fraud on the part of Ahmadinejad and his supporters, and that the vote was rigged months in advance. The letter is here. The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan - who, again, has been ruthlessly compiling a lot of unfiltered information, including graphic video of murdered protesters bleeding out - has a report he culled from Twitter: helicopters in Iran are spraying a type of acid (yes, acid) at protesters. "Similar to what Mojahedeen used in '78-'82." He also just reported that the Canadian embassy is not accepting injured protesters while the Australian embassy is. Sullivan has turned his masthead green in support of the Iranian people. A ally of Moussavi notes that he was "ready for martyrdom" if it came to that. He's also called for a national strike if he's detained by Iranian authorities. Video supposedly from today. The Lede at the Times gives perspective on the sheer scale of protest support: "If it was shot today, given what we have seen of the severe security crackdown, it shows that the opposition movement has not yet been completely contained." One BBC... MORE >>
Steve Jobs Had A Liver Transplant
The Wall Street Journal reports: Steve Jobs had a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago, he's in recovery, and is going to be back to work before the end of the month. Just like they said he would be. Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin of The Wall Street Journal - who, it now appears has an outright monopoly on exclusives and leaks regarding Jobs (something that'd make sense, considering the most direct implication of the Apple CEO's various health crisis: Apple's stock price) - reported last night on the revelation. Though not going to far as to state anything but the actual surgery as outright fact, the Journal's filing vaguely speculated that Jobs' 2004 pancreatic cancer came back, and spread to his liver: William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. "All total, 75% of patients are going to have the disease spread over the course of their life," said Dr. Hawkins, who has not treated Mr. Jobs. Getting a liver transplant to treat a metastasized neuroendocrine tumor is controversial because livers are scarce and the surgery's efficacy as a cure hasn't been proved, Dr. Hawkins added. He said that patients whose tumors have metastasized can live for as many as 10 years without any treatment so it is hard to determine how successful a transplant has been in curing the disease. Jobs took a leave of absence in January, handing control of Apple's day-to-day over to COO Tim Cook after publicly disclosing that he had a "hormone imbalance" that was "robbing" Jobs of his body's healthy proteins. Which sounds nothing like what causes one to get their liver removed. The Apple CEO's been beset by rampant speculation about his health problems by Apple shareholders, journalists and bloggers of the tech and financial stripe, and some very self-entitled fanboys since said 2004 cancer scare. He's also been notoriously mum on the details of said health. Even when more or less busted red-handed, like this, the company continues to run interference, with Apple flack Katie Cotton barely even dignifying the question ("Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there's nothing further to say.") and Jobs not returning anything for comment to the Journal. The notoriously showy CEO enjoys managing his own press, and probably isn't too ecstatic about this bit of news leaking; then again, after what sounded like a pretty traumatic few months, he could probably care less. The guy's got his health back, and a company to run. No doubt the inevitably glitzy Steve Jobs Comeback Special will happen soon in front of a grey curtain, with cheeky jokes and maybe a not-so-subtle U2 soundtrack. Meanwhile, the company didn't go down the shitter while he was gone (at least no more than maybe... MORE >>
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