Thursday's Times includes a story headlined, "After Arrests, Taliban Promote a Fighter", the subhead reads, "An insurgency is said to remain confident despite setbacks."--Not the most informative of introductions to an important story. The story itself reports that Mullah Abdul Quayyum Zakir has been appointed, by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, as his "top deputy" replacing other Taliban commanders who have been killed or arrested in Pakistani or American raids.
But The Times story doesn't report, until its second paragraph, that Zakir is "a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba..." It's eighteen more paragraphs before the Guantanamo connection is again mentioned and another two before the story concludes with a quote with the Associated Press that before leaving Guantanamo "Mr. Zakir told American officials that he had no intention of returning to the battlefield. 'I want to go back home and join my family and work in my land and help my family,' he said..."
Obviously, Zakir has not lived up to his word, and that raises another question: Has the Bush policy of releasing Guantanamo detainees back to Afghanistan restocked the Taliban with hardened fighters to replace those whom we have captured or killed?
As a guy who has written story headlines for more than thirty years, I cannot understand The Times lead-in to this story. The most obvious lead would be "Former Guantanamo Detainee Named Chief Deputy Leader of Taliban". If this headline seemed to slam President Obama's proposal to close Guantanamo, one might extend it to read "Former Guantanamo Detainee, Released Under Bush Administration, Now Named Chief Deputy Leader of Taliban" Either of those headlines would have attracted far more readers than "After Arrests, Taliban Promote a Fighter".
A couple of weeks ago, The Boston Globe, a paper also owned by The New York Times Company, headlined an Associated Press story about Zakir "Freed Afghan detainee with Taliban, officials say." The subhead read "News may stall plan to close jail at Guantanamo."
And that all but plants a question in readers' minds. Did The Times downplay the Guantanamo connection in Thursday's story because it has made its own decision about Guantanamo? On December 17, 2009, a Times editorial declared that "Guantanamo needs to be closed." I have never believed that The Times news reports were shaped by its editorial positions. But, as a professional who knows a good headline when he sees one, I think that the lame headline on Thursday's Taliban story, gives fair-minded readers every right to question the influence of The New York Times' editorial board on its news pages.
I hate to use the New York tabloids as examples of how to handle a story like this but, last year, when the AP reported that Zakir had been appointed the Taliban commander in Helmand province, The New York Post headlined its story "EX-GITMO DETAINEE TOP TALIBAN LEADER" and The Daily News ran with "The one that got away: Taliban's new chief in southern Afghanistan is an ex-Gitmo prisoner, freed". Those headlines get their papers readers. The Times headline gives readers no reason to read the story that follows.
There's no question in my mind that the Guantanamo connection deserved far more attention than it received in the Times story. I expect my conservative friends will think so too, and I'll be receiving a lot of email from them about The Times' "left-wing bias". (None of them even use the word "liberal" anymore.)