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Columbia Journalism Review: Failures of Imagination (9–10/06) by Eric Umansky
New York Times Afghanistan reporter Carlotta Gall overcame her initial reaction to learning the 2002 death of a Bagram Air Base prisoner named Dilawar was a homicide and not simply due to heart attack, as originally claimed by the U.S. military—"I remember gasping and saying, ‘Oh, my God, they killed him.' I hadn’t really been thinking that before.” But Howell Raines and other Times editors found the idea "just hard to get their mind around," despite then-Times foreign editor Roger Cohen having "pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration.... My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says [then-Times investigative editor Doug] Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Instead, the story ran on page 14 under the headline "U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.) Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor.”
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