Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Rohde, who was kidnapped and held captive by the Taliban for eight months between 2008 and 2009, joined HuffPost Live Tuesday to recount his kidnapping and to discuss media coverage of both his capture and the Middle East at large.
Rohde, a former New York Times journalist and current columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic, told HuffPost Live hosts Alicia Menendez and Marc Lamont Hill that the media's decision to largely ignore his kidnapping so as not to give his kidnappers publicity was the right decision, but added that the media is failing to accurately report on the region by ignoring the positive stories coming out of the Muslim world.
"There's 1.6 billion people in the Islamic world, and we are not showing the kind of positive sides," Rohde said, citing examples of brave and entrepreneurial Pakistanis that do not get the same coverage as suicide bombers. "You just don't see that enough in the news, so I'm just asking for the other side as well that really exists out there."
Rohde's recent book, Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East, calls for the United States to embrace and empower moderate Muslims and to leverage American economic power as its greatest tool for influence in the region.
Watch Rohde discuss the book and why he believes that America needs to "engage, but engage in a smarter way" — namely, by focusing on jobs in the Middle East — with the region: