Are news blackouts necessary during kidnapping cases? Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler, who was kidnapped last year, thought so. Fowler led a panel discussion with heads of news outlets at Innis College on Tuesday. The Canadian Journalism Foundation hosted the event.
Fowler is special envoy of the UN Secretary-General to Niger. On Dec. 14, 2008, an al-Qaeda group in Niger kidnapped him and his colleague, holding him for over 4 months. Fowler criticized news agencies for covering his kidnapping, which he felt gave his captors useful information and brought his family “gratuitous pain.”
“I think the easiest solution is the blackout [for kidnapping cases],” said Fowler. He said a blackout worked for Melissa Fung, the Canadian journalist who was kidnapped by armed men in a refugee camp near Kabul. She was held captive for 28 days before tribal leaders negotiated her release. “[A news blackout] probably did have something to do with the difference between [her] 28 and [my] 130 days,” Fowler noted.
Fowler said that if policies about blackouts are not possible from a media solidarity point of view, then news agencies should consult the government, other media outlets, and kidnapping experts before making a decision to run the story.
The other panellists were Stephen Northfield, the foreign news editor at the Globe and Mail, Robert Hurst, president of CTV News and Current Affairs, and John Cruickshank, publisher of the Toronto Star and former head of CBC News.
“Our default as a media organization is to publish,” said Northfield. “It is a position of the Globe that we will not knowingly publish information that will lead to the harm of an individual. It is impossible to be able to gauge the unintended consequences of the publication of anything.”
Northfield concluded that there were no easy answers for holding back on publishing, and that there is a sliding scale when it comes to blackouts.
“I wish there was a rulebook, […] but there isn’t. In each case it’s completely individual. There are all sorts of relative issues,” Northfield said.
Hurst, the most commanding voice of the discussion, defended news organizations and underlined how much discussion takes place before running a story.
“I would like to offer to this room today, and to Mr. Fowler, how seriously we do take these issues in the newsrooms. We talk about them a lot. We discuss it. We debate it. We talk about the pros and cons.”
Cruickshank addressed the problem of containing news stories, but defended the merits of blackouts in certain situations.
As the head of CBC News when Fung was kidnapped in October 2008, Cruickshank was responsible for taking control of the situation and getting other Canadian news organizations to refrain from reporting on Fung’s abduction.
“This is not about suppressing information,” said Cruickshank. “The term ‘blackout’ is an insidious term.” He then offered what he thought was a better definition: “This is delaying.”
“We do in fact suppress information routinely: confessions, stories about suicides, any number of the kinds of stories that we have made by the decisions in public interest to suppress.” Cruickshank added that he expects a consensus soon on how to respond to kidnappings of political figures and journalists.
The last word came when Paul Hunter, who reports from the CBC’s Washington bureau, spoke from the audience. “We have an opportunity now to make up a plan,” said Hunter, who was involved in keeping the Melissa Fung kidnapping under wraps.
“Start the blanket: no active kidnaps get covered and then finesse it. I’m a bit worried that we’ll find ourselves here in another year and somebody else will be kidnapped and we won’t have a protocol or code in place.”
