Captive Journalists
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As Americans celebrate the release to safety of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, two Fox News journalists who had been held captive for nearly two weeks by kidnappers in Gaza, the joy is tempered by the news that another American journalist, Paul Salopek, is being held in Sudan as a prisoner in the same war.
Mr. Salopek, 44, has been held since August 6 and on Saturday was charged with espionage and writing “false news,” according to his employer, the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Salopek won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2001 and for explanatory reporting in 1998. At the time of his arrest, he was on assignment for National Geographic.
Sudan, like Gaza, is an unfree country under sway of radical Islamists. Sudan’s leader, Field Marshal Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, has been in power since 1993. Sudan is on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and its government has been complicit in the genocide in Darfur.Here’s hoping Mr. Salopek is soon freed, and along with him the many, many more Muslim journalists who lack the celebrity of their American colleagues but suffer untold punishments in nations that lack freedom of the press.
