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<< 1995 Livingston Award Recipient David Rohde Escapes from Taliban Kidnappers
I had taken a strong personal interest in Rohde’s prize-winning stories, which documented the massacre of thousands of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. I had won a 1988 Livingston Award for my work on the Philippines, but almost a decade earlier, I had been a war reporter in El Salvador. There I was haunted by a story that got away: the massacre at the Rio Sumpul. I was one of few U.S. reporters in the country at the time, and published interviews with refugees who provided eyewitness accounts. But my time and budget were limited, and the army had blocked access to the area. The only way to fully report the story was to go to the site, and this I was unable to do. (The story was finally confirmed a year later by the late British reporter David Blundy, who made his way to the site and attempted to count the bones of the victims.) When I reviewed David Rohde’s stories at the Livingston Awards lunch, I felt that I was looking at exemplary work that could serve a broader purpose. A few years later I approached him and explained that I had created a course in human rights reporting at the Columbia School of Journalism. Would he be willing to help my class create a case study, describing process and rules of evidence for documenting this dangerous and controversial story, in the interest of illuminating the process for future generations of journalists? Rohde agreed, and was unfailingly gracious in following through. My graduate class – including students from a dozen different countries – assembled a vast website that walked the user through Rohde’s reporting methodology. His editor on the series from the Christian Science Monitor, Fay Bowers, flew down from Boston to participate in video interviews with David, to describe the interplay between reporter and the home office. Additional interviews were posted with the late media scholar James Carey on journalistic ethics, and Roy Gutman, the founder of the Crimes of War project. The site included a timeline on the Bosnian war and shed new light on the role of the Dutch peacekeeping forces. But the heart of the site was David Rohde himself – personally self-effacing, but relentless in getting his story and confirming it beyond any reasonable doubt. In the spring of 2001, the website went public, with the help of the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. It was called “The Rohde to Srebrenica” http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/nelson/rohde/. Soon it won a Yahoo Editors’ Choice Award, and began making its way into the online libraries of journalism programs and law schools across the country. Last fall, when I learned of Rohde’s kidnapping from a friend in television, it was a terrible blow, since I had experienced his integrity and generosity first-hand. The news of his release came in an AP story – which also described his assistance with the case study and a link to the site. The students who constructed the site are now working at leading news organizations across the globe. Doubtless they joined everyone connected to the Livingston Awards in the celebration of David Rohde’s freedom, with a deep appreciation for both the importance of his work, and his vast courage in pursuing it. |
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When David Rohde escaped his Taliban kidnappers and made his way to freedom June 19, many publications described him as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.” But I was among those who recalled his 1995 Livingston Award.