Wikipedia Censored To Protect Captive Reporter

AI writes with a story from the NY Times about a 7-month-long effort, largely successful, to keep news of a Times reporter's kidnapping off of Wikipedia. The Christian Science Monitor, the reporter David Rohde's previous employer, takes a harder look at the issues of censorship and news blackout, linking to several blogs critical of Wikipedia's actions. Rohde escaped from a Taliban compound, along with his translator, on Saturday. "For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. ... A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping... The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times."

Re:Hypocrites

[Hawthorne01]

Okay, you got it [wikipedia.org]

The New York Times gladly hid behind the 1st Amendment and blabbed about a 100% legal, effective and yet secret means to track terrorist money around the globe, yet clammed up when it was their hide on the line.

Hypocrites.

Wish the NYT had more concern about non-employees

[Alaska Jack]

Obviously, everyone is glad Rodheis home safely. Neverthess, many around the blogosphere have pointed out that the Times has a two-faced approach to this kind of secrecy.

Take, for example, the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the Times did a big expose of back in '06. There were absolutely no questions that this program was

• Constitutional
• legal
• briefed to the appropriate members of congress, and
• working!

Yet that didn't stop the Times from announcing to every terrorist from Marrakech to Jakarta all about it, how to avoid getting caught by it, etc.

Again, there is no dispute that this program was working; in other words, nailing terrorists -> saving civilian lives. Too bad the lives it was saving weren't those of Times employees!

PS Good overview here [nationalreview.com], by the guy who led the Justice Department's prosecution against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

- AJ

Re:Not censorship

[Jiro]

It was published by Afghanistan's leading news agency. That's a reliable source. Deleting it for not having reliable sources was an abuse of the rules, and in fact a very common one where people refuse to accept a source which can't easily be Googled in English. If they really wanted to delete the information it should have been done using the Ignore All Rules policy or the Office policy, not by abusing rules. And as a lot of people have already mentioned, newspapers constantly publish information about people who are not in the newspaper business, even when someone claims that it could endanger lives (see for instance this one from the Times [nytimes.com], and yes, Wikipedia has an article about the guy).

Re:the blackout was a good idea

[hondo77]

At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, perhaps the most blatant example would be the bombing of Coventry.

Good example...except that it did not happen [bbc.co.uk].

Re:why

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just lately, purging interesting and relevant information as "non-notable" or "non-encyclopedic" has been a wikipedia disease for years. It's not at all consistently applied either, you'll find editors that VfD everything and yet furiously defend their 10,000 word exhaustive analysis of some obscure anime that 6 people in the world care about.

WP is not fair, democratic or open and it never has been. Cabals of mentally ill obsessives with nothing better to do wield most of the power, and decisions on controversial issues are routinely made behind closed doors.

Re:the blackout was a good idea

[budgenator]

With so many contractors, journalists, and even tourists floating around Afghanistan, some are bound to be kidnapped. The recent escape by David Rohde provides a happy conclusion, though these things often end up with a bullet in the head, or a head sawed off for all to see. Kidnappings are so common in Afghanistan that most barely make the news. ...

David Rohde's journey was peculiar because it's . . . well, peculiar. He is a high-profile man associated with a high-profile company. Otherwise, his kidnapping was just one of probably hundreds, or more.

The dangers of going unembedded are different than when with soldiers. I could give some hints that could increase the safety of correspondents and contractors, but those hints are not for public discussion other than this: If you are a civilian contractor or journalist who goes into areas with possibility of kidnapping, itâ(TM)s important to give written permission for a rescue attempt. For servicemembers, no permission would be needed, but journalists, contractors and NGOs will likely not be rescued without permission from a spouse or close relative, unless that permission was granted in advance. Precious time will be lost gaining those permissions. Most rescues are better done immediately.

There have been times when rescues could have occurred but permission was slow in coming. Our "rescue people" are the best in the world. I cannot address the situation of David Rohde because I do not know the facts, other than that he was kidnapped in Afghanistan and taken to Pakistan. After he hit Pakistan, everything changed. The first days after a kidnapping are crucial. ...

And so that's about it. I sat on David Rohde information and am happy to have done so. Would the New York Times have done the same for a soldier or for me? That would be their decision.

Michael Yon
Afghanistan
The Road to Hell: Part II [michaelyon-online.com]

That's a pretty good catch-22, if he wasn't a Pulitzer winning Journalist, his kidnapping would have been as newsworthy a purse snatching in NY.

Re:the blackout was a good idea

[Obfuscant]

"Nightline", the ABC nightly news magazine, began as a nightly report on the kidnapped American embassy workers in Iran. http://www.wchstv.com/abc/nightline/ [wchstv.com].

Do you imagine that the kidnappers of those Americans didn't seek the massive news attention to their actions?

Re:Double Standard

[BikeHelmet]

This would be like doctors giving preferential treatment to other doctors (eg. less waiting time in countries with socialized medicine) or teachers distributing textbooks only to the children of other teachers. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, but it is profoundly wrong.

Doctors do get preferential treatment here. Where I live (BC, Canada - bless the Liberals and their stance on Healthcare), stuff takes a ludicrously long time to happen.

Need a CT? We'll see you in 9-15 months! Fell down the stairs, and need an X-Ray, and Ultrasound to rule out internal bleeding? I'll book you for August! (over a month from now) Malignant melanomas? You've got two!? That's urgent, so we'll get those cut out in four and a half months!

What? You used to be a doctor? See you next week!

The only way to get in shortly is to go to emergency, fall down and roll around on the floor while drooling.

Or move to some other part of Canada. Or the US.

Side-Note: A teacher I know somehow got her kid registered for a computer programming course. When he started, he didn't even know how to turn the damn thing on. He's now in his second year, and frequently asks me for help, and I never even took the course. >_< He says he learns more off me than from college. (I'm not sure if this reflects poorly on him, the College, or his parents; regardless, it supports there already being a double standard)

Re:To keep him alive.

[Achromatic1978]

LOL. It was cited. So, in the face of their own policies being used against them, WP stuck its fingers in its ears and claimed that the Afghan national news agency wasn't a "Reliable Source".

Don't start me on Verifiability. It's a variable bar, which moves up and down with the motives of the contributor. And "Verifiability, Not Truth!" - ye gods.

Re:Wikipedia Page

[AnyoneEB]

You misunderstood the GP. No one is denying the raid. The part that he was asserting to be false was that the Allies knew about it in advance and did nothing about it for fear of revealing that they had cracked the German codes. Wikipedia agrees [wikipedia.org] that that is just a myth, although its wording is not very strong.

Re:Double Standard

[Acer500]

his would be like doctors giving preferential treatment to other doctors (eg. less waiting time in countries with socialized medicine) or teachers distributing textbooks only to the children of other teachers. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, but it is profoundly wrong.

Sadly, the doctors' preferential treatment happens all the time here in Uruguay, where medicine is being more and more socialized (they wanted a level playing field... and the current government are leveling down :( ). You absolutely must know a doctor, or a political figure, or you'll have 2,3 or 4 months wait period to see a specialist (say, a dermatologist). Unless you pay one of the soon-to-be-outlawed US style health insurances, which are expensive by local standards (upwards of 100 USD/month plus some expenses).

Re:the blackout was a good idea

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

First several are about escapes from Taliban after the fact. Several more are about the Taliban freeing captives. Only one (in the first page) is a case where captives were still being held - and even at that, they are reporting on the actions of another party pleading for their freedom.

... scrolling further through the list, I two cases, several years apart. In those, there was a publicly broadcast video originating from the Taliban; but that notwithstanding, do you think those are the really the only times that a non-reporter has been kidnapped?

Seems to me that they've done a fairly good job of not reporting in cases when doing so would increase the danger to those kidnapped.