Former Iraq Hostage Among Shorenstein Fellows

Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who was kidnapped in Iraq last year, will be spending this semester at Harvard as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

While at the Shorenstein Center, Carroll will be investigating the decline of foreign bureaus given the changes in the newspaper industry.

Carroll was working as a freelance reporter in Baghdad this year when Sunni Muslim insurgents kidnapped her on Jan. 7, according to Carroll’s account in the Christian Science Monitor.

Carroll was held hostage for 82 days before her eventual release on March 30.

After freeing Carroll, her kidnappers released a video in which Carroll, her head covered in a scarf, criticized the occupation of Iraq and praised the insurgency.

Carroll’s family has since explained that Carroll was under the complete control of her captors when she made the video.

Both the Monitor and the Carroll family deny that they paid for her release, although Carroll’s captors originally demanded a $10 million ransom. The captors later said that they no longer wanted ransom money.

In addition to Carroll, three other journalists have been selected as Shorenstein fellows: Allan M. Siegal, Garance Franke-Ruta ’97, and William Powers.

Until retiring in May of this year at age 66, Siegal was a reporter and editor at the New York Times for four and half decades, helping produce the Times’ coverage of the Pentagon Papers.

He will be researching cases in which the press had to decide whether to cooperate with the government regarding issues of national security.

Siegal said that he became interested in the topic after President George W. Bush denounced the Times in June for disclosing information about the government’s policy of monitoring the currency transactions of suspected terrorists.

“I felt that both conventional wisdom and the opinion of news media audiences was probably unaware of how often in the past newspapers have made decisions to withhold entire articles or subjects or parts of them,” Siegal said Thursday.

“I just felt that this subject is very little understood by the society in general and the present discussion was shedding heat rather than light,” he added.

Garance Franke-Ruta ’97, who is a senior editor at The American Prospect, will examine the representation of women in opinion journalism during her time at Harvard.

William Powers, the media critic for National Journal magazine, will investigate ‘the death of paper’ and its implications for media content.

In addition to conducting their research, the fellows will participate in various events at the Shorenstein Center, according to Fellows and Programs Administrator Edith Holway.

“Obviously the point of being at Harvard is to be around students,” Siegal said.

--Staff writer Stephanie S. Garlow can be reached at sgarlow@fas.harvard.edu.