“This should scare the hell out of you.”

I have been following Katie O’s blog for a while and enjoy the irreverence, humor and insight of a fellow journalism major who is now out in the real world doing things that people do in the real world.

For journalists, this means blogging.

Her most recent entry details the New York Times’ cover-up of David Rohde’s kidnapping. It raises many interesting questions about the powers and responsibilities of the New York Times.

For example, “How many stories have been/are being hidden from public view?”

Besides lazy journalism and corporate influence, how much more are we missing from coverage? And how do you balance freedom of speech with the right to life?

Here is an excerpt, but I strongly recommend checking out the entire post:
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?