The Daily Background

I’ve been privately following this story for several days as it developed, and more than once, I’ve come close to writing an entry on it. I guess I might as well stop stalling. For the past several days, print media industry journal website Editor & Publisher (one of my regular reads) has been covering the story of a female American journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq.

Her name is Jill Carroll, and she works for Christian Science Monitor as a professional columnist covering Iraq, who is not on their payroll. That is, journalists who don’t receive a regular salary and instead get paid for each piece they write are called “stringers.” It’s like “freelancer” but it suggests a higher level of professionalism.

When Carroll was kidnapped in Iraq, E&P provided the following summary of the situation:

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.

As that explains, the CSM chose not to report on the event- and asked other news organizations to hold off on reporting, such as AP’s wire service which sends articles out to hundreds of newspapers daily, and other major news services. The following explains why:

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.

It’s fairly simple, really. A monitor spokesperson stated the daily (nonpartisan or religious– despite its name) paper had been advised by professionals dealing with such issues “the less that is said, the better.” It was probably a difficult decision for the management of CSM to make, but they made it and they stuck with it. A Washington Post reporter explained further:

Knickmeyer, 42, said the abduction is another sign of how dangerous the situation has gotten for reporters in the past year. “We go out and talk to Iraqis every day, but there are areas of the city we can’t go to without security,” she said. “It is worse now than when I came here last January.” She said the violence was turned up a notch after the new government took over last April. “There was a surge, daily bombings,” she noted.

She also defended the news blackout in which most major U.S. news outlets, including the Post, did not report on Carroll’s abduction for two days at the request of the Monitor. “That is standard with kidnappings,” she said. “More often it is that we don’t hear about it for days. When it happens in the journalist community, it gets out quickly and we try to keep people from being hurt by the fact that they are a journalist.“

Now you may wonder why I’m making such a big deal of the reasons for the blackout. It’s because many people who are just reading about the story now don’t understand the why there was a press blackout on the story. They think it had to do with press incompetence, bias or so on. It’s because of stuff like this:

The president of Military Reporters and Editors (MRE), Sig Christenson, criticized U.S. media outlets late Tuesday for engaging in a two-day blackout to hide news that an American journalist, Jill Carroll, had been abducted in Iraq.

Christenson, military affairs reporter for the San Antonio Express-News and a three-time Iraq embed, said the effort to keep news about a reporter’s kidnapping from readers gives the wrong impression.

“Why isn’t somebody asking about the ethics of this?” Christenson said in a phone interview late Tuesday. “I question whether it was ethical of them to do what they did–the (abducted reporter’s) newspaper and the others that were involved in this.”

Shut the hell up, Christenson. Stick to your little Iraq Journalism Embed program (we all know how “unbiased” and low quality reporting that Pentagon program leads to), and stop questioning ethics. Every move that CSM and other major news organizations made was designed specifically to protect the life of a reporter.

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