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"If I want to learn about the indignities suffered by radical Muslims, I know where to look."

October 22, 2009

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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.”

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Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.