Wall Street Journal proud it kept Evan Gershkovich in the spotlight

Assistant Editor Paul Beckett said Sunday he was proud that the Wall Street Journal kept detained journalist Evan Gershkovich's plight in the public eye until his release was imminent last week.

"Very very early on," Beckett said on CBS' "Face the Nation," "someone in the government to whom I’ll always be grateful to for this advice said there's a time to be loud, and there's a time to be quiet and now is the time to be loud. And so we stayed loud until we knew the time to be quiet. And that time to be quiet was Wednesday and Thursday of this week."

Gershkovich, who was detained in Russia on March 2023 on espionage charges, was among the prisoners and political dissidents released as part of a multi-nation agreement that brought three people back to the United States and 13 to Germany from Russia and Belarus.

Eight prisoners were sent back to Russia, including convicted killer Vadim Krasikov from Germany and accused spy Mikhail Mikushin from Norway.

CBS' Ed O'Keefe asked Beckett if there was any concern that by making their journalist's plight so public, they were endangering him.

"The Russians didn't give us much of a choice, because they came out and said, he is a spy — total nonsense," Beckett said of Gershkovich.

The veteran journalist also said his staff kept their responsibilities in mind, as the Gershkovich story became part of the news itself.

"We tried to separate the two as best we could, and appropriately so," he said. "We had the newsroom who was covering the story. And we have written a huge amount of tremendous journalism, on the case and related cases and the dynamics and everything. We've covered it very aggressively as a story. And then there were a few of us who were really ambassadors for Evan."

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva as they landed in Maryland late Thursday. "Their brutal ordeal is over and they're free," Biden said earlier that day .

Republicans led by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have attacked the deal as empowering Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Trump saying Saturday : “I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal."

"We all join in the joy for the family and friends of the American hostages that were released. We're always welcoming them back," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday on "Face the Nation." "Unfortunately, that joy is tempered by the reality that they're going to be more hostages in the future, and families are going to have to grieve for their absence in the future."

While saying these type of deals were inherently distasteful, Beckett said: "We understand the risks. We understand the hypotheticals. I think the key to all of this is what can now be done to prevent these countries doing this in the future."

Almar Latour, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, said on ABC's "This Week" that he did not see this as being about politics.

"The beauty of this whole campaign has been that we have stayed out of politics because this was about getting Evan back, getting these prisoners back," Latour said to host George Stephanopoulos.

"The prisoner swaps have existed throughout history. They will continue to exist. I do believe that certainly now, that Evan is back, and the others are back, we need to think about how we treat countries that have turned us into an industry."