On Wednesday, David Rohde came home to an emotional welcome in the newsroom of The New York Times. There were tears, hugs and sustained applause for him and Tahir Ludin, an Afghan journalist with whom Rohde slipped down a 20-foot wall and escaped after being held captive by the Taliban for more than seven months. Although word spread quickly last November among Western reporters in Afghanistan that Rohde, Ludin and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, had been snatched, The Times persuaded news organizations around the world to keep a lid on the story with a simple appeal: The kidnappers had demanded silence. 'Possibly by defying them, we would be signing David's death warrant,' said Bill Keller, the paper's executive editor. Now that Rohde and Ludin are free -- Mangal 'chose not to try to escape,' Rohde said -- a debate has erupted over whether Keller and The Times, normally driven to get stories in the paper, not suppress them, did the right thing. 'We agonized over this constantly,' Keller said, 'revisited it frequently.' Even after the captors sent out tapes in what seemed a possible bid for publicity, there was no coverage because, Keller said, their initial instructions had been so explicit. I have a feeling for what was going through the minds of Times editors. In 2005, while I was Washington editor of the Knight Ridder newspapers, our Jerusalem correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, and a British photographer were abducted in Gaza by armed thugs. Fearing for their lives, I asked news organizations not to report it -- and none did. Fortunately, the journalists were freed within hours, not months. Had I been in Keller's shoes, I would have done what he did for Rohde and his companions, even though Keller acknowledged, 'I'll never know for sure whether our silence had any impact whatsoever on David's fate.' But some readers and even other journalists see hypocrisy when a news organization subordinates its fundamental obligation to inform the public to its human impulse to protect one of its own. The Times went to extraordinary lengths to quash the Rohde story and to shape information that might be available to the kidnappers on the Internet. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was enlisted to keep word of the kidnapping off that site, even as user-editors tried to post it. Michael Yon, an independent journalist, posted an item on his blog in March and was quickly asked to take it down, which he did. Michael Moss, a Times reporter, edited Rohde's biography on Wikipedia to highlight his reporting that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims and to remove the fact that he once worked for The Christian Science Monitor. Moss wrote similar information on Rohde's Times Topics page on the paper's Web site. He and Catherine Mathis, the Times' spokeswoman, even persuaded a group of New England newspapers to remove Rohde's wedding notice and photos from their Web site so the kidnappers would not have personal information they could use to pressure him psychologically. I found this last action troubling because The Times takes a hard line against removing information from its own archive. 'I was acting as David's friend,' Moss said. 'I was not thinking at all about the First Amendment.' Richard Vegh, a reader in Rochester, Minn., wrote that he was alarmed at the lengths The Times went to because 'a hypothetical kidnapping involving a non-media insider or journalist would likely not be afforded the same consideration.' Keller said The Times listens to appeals to keep kidnappings quiet for the safety of the victims, and 'our tendency is to go along with that.' He said: 'I would apply the same policy to a journalist, to a non-journalist, to a civilian or to the military. We don't take life and death situations lightly.' But in practice, journalists seem to fare better. 'Journalists all know one another, and they know how the media works,' said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'They know how to make the request.' For others, the news media can seem remote. Mike Ackerman of Miami, whose firm, the Ackerman Group, helps retrieve kidnap victims, said he'd never requested a news blackout because 'we've always assumed they wouldn't do it.' Last fall, around the time Rohde was abducted, The Times and other news organizations sat for a month on the story of Mellissa Fung, a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who was kidnapped in Kabul. While she was in captivity, The Times published an article about the kidnapping of a French aid worker in Kabul. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said nobody made a request to hold that story. The Frenchman's small nongovernmental organization had told its people not to speak to reporters. He was freed a month later. Carlotta Gall, who covers Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Times and wrote about the Frenchman, said, 'I feel we should write about every kidnapping equally.' Gall said she is on record with her editors as wanting coverage if she is abducted. 'I am not convinced that keeping a kidnapping out of the news makes it any safer for the victims,' she said. The Times went to extra lengths Thursday, when it reported a terse announcement by the U.S. military that an American soldier had been taken hostage by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan. With Rohde's case fresh in mind, the paper said it was assured by military officials that the details it was reporting would not increase the danger to the soldier, and that it had agreed not to name him if it learned his identity. But Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said the military made its announcement only because it believed a foreign news organization was going to run the story. Commanders in Afghanistan had hoped for a news blackout while they tried to recover the soldier, he said. Dilemmas like the Rohde kidnapping put editors in excruciating positions. Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida, criticized The Times' decision in an open letter to Keller published online, but she told me, 'Knowing myself, I can't say I would have operated any differently.' McBride said news organizations need a broad agreement on how to handle all kidnappings. Noting that most withhold some news, like the names of rape victims, she suggested options like reporting kidnappings but withholding names or affiliations of those captured. Such agreement seems a good but perhaps impossible goal in today's fragmented media world, especially in war zones, where news organizations from many countries may have far different standards. Keller said it is worth discussing trying to build in a pause so that news organizations can reach out to families or employers -- rather than expecting them to ask -- to find out what harm might be caused by reporting a kidnapping. Rohde knows what his standard would be. 'The paper definitely did the right thing' in his case, he said. 'Any request not to report a kidnapping I think should be honored.' 