Op-Ed appears on MSNBC website urging Biden 'to bring Austin Tice home'

William McCarren, director of the Press Freedom Center at the National Press Club, wrote an op-ed that appeared on the MSNBC website Friday calling on the Biden administration to do everything it can to bring Austin Tice home from Syria.

In 2012, Tice -- a Georgetown University alumnus, freelance journalist, and veteran captain of the U.S. Marine Corps from Houston, Texas -- traveled to Syria to report on the unfolding crisis for McClatchy News, the Washington Post, and other publications. He traveled extensively across the country covering various aspects of the Syrian conflict, earning a George Polk Award for War Reporting, a John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, and the McClatchy President's Award for Journalism Excellence. He was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus on Aug. 14, 2012, and is believed to still be in Syria.

“Austin is not only a Polk Award winning journalist, but a Marine veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, law student, Eagle Scout and Texan. Syria might as well be holding America itself hostage,” McCarren wrote. “The U.S. system depends on citizens having information about the world. When a journalist is taken, that information becomes harder to find. Hostage takers throw sand in the gears of democracy.”

The Club’s Press Freedom Center “has proposed that the government should revise its policy on hostages and immediately give a presumptive declaration of wrongful detention when journalists are targeted,” McCarren wrote noting that it took 13 days before the U.S. government declared Evan Gershkovich wrongfully detained and Alsu Kurmasheva, another U.S. journalist, was jailed in Russia for 250 days and only upon release was declared officially wrongfully detained.