Protecting our own

Before we knew there would be a happy ending to Mellissa Fung's kidnapping, journalists were debating how we would look for conspiring to keep it from being published. If it were a diplomat or a civilian, would we have upheld a four-week publication ban? If it were a politician? A soldier? I argued that first, it's inside baseball and the general public won't think twice about it, and second, it's hard to say we wouldn't have done it for anyone else, since it's such a rare situation.

Today's Globe and Mail devotes two pages to covering Fung's release, including a lengthy article on the debate within the newsrooms. (As an aside, there are days I flip through the front section without reading anything more than the ledes, but today's paper is a good read - both Stephanie Nolen's piece on Stephen Lewis' work in Zimbabwe and the Fung coverage deserve to be read in full).

This kind of debate is hard to settle, if only because we would need to encounter another situation almost exactly like it in order to decide it. These cases are always weighed on their own merits, and even another journalist's kidnapping could be played out differently, nevermind a kidnapping involving a diplomat or civilian.

The Globe article points to an example I had been using this weekend - James Loney's 2006 kidnapping in Iraq. While the kidnapping was reported, all the coverage I read and watched avoided mentioning he is gay. That was to protect him from possible punishment from his fundamentalist kidnappers. His husband stayed out of the spotlight at a time when loved ones were speaking about him and the other kidnap victims, only emerging once Loney was safe. The Globe and Mail also points out that it respected a 24-hour embargo on reporting the kidnapping when it first happened.

Some people have pointed to Amanda Lindhout's kidnapping in Somalia as an example of what happens when you don't work for a place as powerful as the CBC. Lindhout is a freelancer without an organization behind her to ask that nobody report on the case, and her story has been on tv and in the papers. I'm not familiar with her situation but it's likely there was no appeal to keep it quiet when she disappeared. Plus, she was kidnapped with an Australian photographer, and any time citizens from more than one country are involved, the story is harder to suppress (Loney was kidnapped along with other aid workers from England and America). Fung was alone with her Afghan fixer and driver, and her story didn't make it much beyond the Afghan media until she was rescued.

Finally, both the CBC and the Canadian Press have quoted their handbooks, which guide ethics discussions on news coverage. Both handbooks tell journalists not to risk lives over a story.

This is a healthy debate to have, and will be a serious consideration for all newsrooms the next time they're asked to keep a life-or-death situation under wraps. Hopefully it'll be a long time before this debate moves from a philosophical one to a practical one.