[WikiEN-l] Another Media and Wikipedia blackout on NYT reporter in Afghanistan

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Keith Old wrote:
> Folks,
> >From the Huffington Post:
>
> "Last November, David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan and held for
> several months, before managing to escape with his interpreter. Media around
> the world, at the request of the *Times*, kept silent about the kidnapping,
> and later drew criticism for this from some quarters. It has just happened
> again -- with my magazine, *Editor & Publisher*, among those not writing
> about it -- in the case of another well-known *New York Times*reporter in
> Afghanistan, but for a much shorter period of time.
>
> Stephen Farrell, with his aide Sultan Munadi, were seized on Saturday and
> freed just hours ago in a daring raid by British commandos. Munadi and a
> commando were killed. Farrell is fine.
>
> I saw some indications that Farrell had been snatched in my regular Web
> searches for media scoops over the weekend. As in the case of Rohde, a
> handful of not prominent blogs, along with very scattered media abroad (in
> their original language) reported that something was up, but confirmation
> was slight, given the silence of the *Times* and U.S. military.
>
> This went on for two days, as I kept searching -- and finding that, once
> again, the media apparently were not rushing anything into print or online.
>
> Also, as in the case of Rohde, I noticed that Farrell's Wikipedia entry had
> been scrubbed -- some user kept trying to post the kidnapping and the "news"
> kept getting deleted, before the entry was put under "protected" status and
> the cat and mouse game stopped. You can see it in the "history" there along
> with complaints of this "censorship crap" occurring again. "
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/again-media-and-wikipedia_b_280233.html
>   
BTW, I think TFA is remarkably even handed about how it
describes what happened.

This doesn't surprise me personally since I have read Greg Mitchell's
book The Campaign of the Century, which I recommend strongly
for anyone who is interested in how it came to be that politics and
the media became to be so closely entwined, or anyone wanting to
just get an amazingly wide canvas snapshot of both the world at
large and California of 1934 vintage in particular. The book recounts
Upton Sinclair's attempt to run for governor of CA. Arguably that
year was epochal in the development of media-politics, as the
studios really took a unified stance to oppose that run.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Greg Mitchell didn't have to battle
with his own BLP issues when writing that book.

While I can't prove that Greg Mitchell knew of Robert A. Heinlein's
heavy involvement in the EPIC movement at that time, it would be
quite astonishing if he was not aware of it, considering he notes much
thinner connections to lesser Science Fiction authors and EPIC and
Sinclair. Heinlein was still alive at that time and very adamant that
his involvement with EPIC was not made explicitly public, at least in
his own writings. I can well imagine that Heinlein or his wife Ginny
might have asked Mitchell to with-hold mentioning Heinlein in his
book on "BLP grounds".


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen