David Rohde: reporter, former captive…and Taliban sympathizer? In a section in her New York Post column entitled “Read it in the Taliban Times,” Andrea Peyser accuses NYT reporter David Rohde–and his widely admired “Held by the Taliban” series–of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome writ journalistic.
“What kind of zeal for terrorist-appeasement,” Peyser asks, “prompted The New York Times to commission a front-page apology to the Taliban?”
David Rohde’s series that premiered in the Gray Lady this week, detailing his seven-month capture by terror-mongers, displays a Timesian kinship with guys who would sooner murder Americans than shake our hands.
Sprinkled through the articles, in which Rohde describes his harrowing capture by cave-hopping demons who, the author notes, enjoy “superior roads, electricity and infrastructure,” is evidence of deep sympathy for their mental garbage.
The upshot is that Peyser provides a nearly perfectly framed treatment of the difference between The New York Times and the New York Post. Particularly in the following:
“I’ll probably never know,” she writes, “what the reporter experienced after he ignored the advice of sensible colleagues and set out to “understand” the plight of a bloodthirsty troupe that, for whatever reason, treated him to bottled water and failed to beat him.”
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.