When the New York Times reported last week that one of it’s reporters and his translator had just escaped from the Taliban after months of captivity, how many of you thought, “Hm, I don’t remember hearing about a kidnapped reporter…?”

That’s because you didn’t.

And the reason you didn’t was because of two of the scariest words in the English language: Media Blackout. In his piece this Sunday, public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that, as per order of the kidnappers, the Times instructed major media outlets worldwide to keep a lid on the story that David Rohde, Afghan journalist Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal had been taken captive. “Possibly by defying them,” said executive editor Bill Keller, “we would be signing David’s death warrant.”

So the paper put tremendous effort into keeping the world in the dark about what had happened. They recruited Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to patrol that site and keep any related news off, even as users tried to post it.

Rohde’s biography on Wikipedia and on the Times website was edited to appear “sympathetic to Muslims,” removing possibly harmful information like his previous employment with The Christian Science Monitor. (I don’t read the CSM, and cannot find the reason why this fact would cast Rohde in an unfavorable light among Muslims. Little help?)

To prevent the kidnappers from learning any personal information about him that could be used against him psychologically, the Times also persuaded a group of New England papers to remove his wedding announcement and photos from their archives. An interesting move when the NYT (as Hoyt himself notes) has such a stringent policy on removing information from its own archives.

I am thankful that Mr. Rohde and Mr. Ludin are safe and commend them for their bravery in their daring escape. And I even applaud the Times for being so committed to the safety of its reporters that it went to such lengths to protect one of them. In times of war, it unfortunately becomes necessary to bend the rules a little bit, and go against long standing ethical guidelines of the news industry. Even bastions of journalistic excellence like The New York Times must sometimes check their Pulitzer Prize-winning coats at the door in lieu of a more human approach to the business. Like Ed Bradley stepping in to help Vietnamese refugees ashore as their boat sank (instead of merely reporting on the event,) sometimes morality must prevail.

However.

The whole episode does bring into question the ability of the Times to perform such an operation. A swift, tactical, complete media blackout is a very scary notion. Even the blogosphere was silenced. Granted, in this case it was for a good cause, and probably met with little resistance. But for bigger, juicier, more consequential stories, should we have any doubt that they couldn’t enact the same purposeful total eclipse of information for less benign reasons? Did the Times inadvertently grant a peak behind the curtain and reveal a glimpse of the type of control (cooperation?)  they can exact from the Fourth Estate?

Think of the scope. Think of the media enterprises with the same pull as the Times: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post (though maybe a little less so now than before last Thursday,) Le Monde, The Times (UK).  How many stories  have been/are being hidden from public view? What are we missing?

This should scare the hell out of you.