CANADIAN TV REPORTER
FREED IN AFGHANISTAN
TELLS OF PRISONER EXCHANGE
SHOULD THE NEWS MEDIA HAVE REMAINED SILENT?
(Nov 8th, 2008 9:00AM PST)
BY ERS NEWS
By all accounts Mellissa Fung is a courageous woman. She was stabbed, kidnapped and held hostage outside Kabul, Afghanistan since October 12, 2008. She spent nearly four weeks being hidden by her captors in a tiny dirt hole, routinely blindfolded and chained. Her story and ordeal were described in a lengthy interview broadcast on the Canadian TV just days ago
You can also read this Canadian Press interview transcript with Fung. transcript
Fung’s kidnapping was known by over two dozen western media outlets at some point after it happened on Oct 12, 2008. None of those news organizations reported her kidnapping. ERSNews.com, The Enterprise Report was among those news organizations. A source had alerted us to her kidnapping and was questioning why media outlets had agreed in censoring in any news about her case. This news blackout was the result of the direct request of the CBC, Canada’s national TV channel. ERS, as well as other news media outlets, withheld what we new about the case. We did so because of the direct request made by the CBC. Their rational was that any news of her capture could interfere with on going negotiations at the time to secure her safe release. That plea was honored by our news organization as well as others, but not without debate, trepidation and concern for a clear double standard. Did the CBC and other news outlets follow that same approach in other cases? The clear answer was no. Why was this case different? Before we got a clear answer, Fung was released.
The complete details of how Fung’s release came about are still sketchy. Fung has confirmed that part of the deal to secure her freedom was an agreement by Afghan intelligence to release jailed suspects related to the kidnappers.
The full story has yet to be told, but for Fung her harrowing ordeal is now over.
Any Canadian journalist possessing a scintilla of empathy had to have been pleased last Saturday to learn that CBC-TV reporter Mellissa Fung had been released, alive and relatively unscathed, after 28 days of captivity in Afghanistan.
Her ordeal was terrifying, and the list of cases worldwide in which the abduction of a journalist ends badly is already too long.
This week’s celebratory parade of news stories, columns, feature-length interviews and transcripts about the Fung case, mostly at the CBC, however, has pushed that niggling little matter of the voluntary media blackout spanning the weeks prior to her release off the public agenda. It’s an issue to which anyone interested in free and vigorous journalism should feel compelled to return.
In the hours following Fung’s capture, CBC executives issued pleas for co-operation with a blackout on reporting on her case, both to their Canadian colleagues at news organizations such as The Canadian Press, CTVglobemedia and Canwest, as well as to other news outlets internationally, such as The New York Times and The Associated Press. The argument was simple and ultimately persuasive: Publicity about Fung’s case could exacerbate her situation by helping her captors understand the value of the currency in their hands. Any reporting on her kidnapping could endanger her life.
And so news organizations played along. Hours became days and days became weeks. A mere embargo became an extended blackout. While the journalistic community was buzzing about Fung’s fate and the state of negotiations to free her, Canadians remained in the dark — because a handful of news executives had decreed they would not know.
The impulse among journalists to protect one of their own is understandable, even laudable. But the suspension by any news organization of its primary missional activity — the timely, fair and open reporting of information to the public — represents a descent into murky waters. If Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon were abducted on an upcoming trip to Kandahar Air Field, would Canadian journalism executives abide by a similar request from the Prime Minister’s Office not to report it?
