Kidnapping of David Rohde
During his captivity, Rohde's colleagues at The New York Times appealed to other members of the news media not to publish any stories reporting on the abduction.
The kidnappers initially insisted on no publicity and issued a series of difficult and unclear demands, including the release of Taliban prisoners being held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and the payment of ransoms of tens of millions of dollars.
Richard Holbrooke, then US envoy to South Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor Condoleezza Rice were also involved in the efforts to liberate Rohde and his colleagues.
Negotiations proved slow and inconclusive,[3] but the captors reportedly signaled early on that they would not kill Rohde,[4] though the captives themselves were regularly threatened with death.
The rope was several feet short of the ground, forcing the men to drop the last stage; Ludin injured his foot in the fall, though Rohde was unhurt.
[8] The escapees made contact with a scout from the Pakistan Army, narrowly escaping being fatally mistaken for Taliban fighters,[1] and were taken to a Frontier Corps post, from where they were flown to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
"[6] They issued a statement declaring that it was "hard to describe the enormous relief we felt at hearing the news of David and Tahir's escape and knowing he is safe.
"[9] The Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, stated: "From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David's family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several government and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger.
Murphy nonetheless observed that the question of "whether the press is guilty of a double standard – protecting its own while reporting on other kidnapping cases" was likely to become "the subject of extended debate .
"[13] Bob Steele, a media ethicist at the Poynter Institute, comments: News organizations are balancing competing obligations if a journalist is kidnapped or detained.
[9]Bill Keller of the Times told The Washington Post that "there was a pretty firm consensus" among those whom he had consulted "that you really amp up the danger when you go public ...
An anonymous source quoted by New York Magazine claims that experts involved in the kidnapping never believed that David's life was in danger.
Wales turned to "trusted" Wikipedia administrators to repeatedly edit the article to remove all references to the kidnapping, and prevent already published information from being further disseminated.
[17] Peter Sussman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee likened the description of Wales involvement to that of a newspaper editor, and cautioned that an editorial role in censorship requires a degree of disclosure.
[18] One rationale cited by Wales, in complying with the Times' request, was that the media blackout of the story, among major western/English-language news services at least, was relatively effective: "We were really helped by the fact that it hadn't appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source.
