http://www.techcrunch.com/2009…orting-on-his-capture/

Earlier this week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release.

This is an interesting conclusion to the story..I wonder how this parallels to the Laura Ling and Euna Lee situation, which took the complete opposite turn when it came to coverage, and whose situations grow more dire by the minute.

CurrentTV has kept completely quiet about it, but politicians and the news networks have tried all they can to keep the public up to date–but is it effective?

Does all the attention given to them simply raise the “value” of the journalists who are captured, making it that much harder for them to either escape, or negotiate an escape?

Are the news networks and politicians helping the cause at all by bringing all this attention to their cases and making the public aware?

Based on the situation above, and through common sense, I’m inclined to say no…holding candlelight vigils and posting links of Ling/Lee on Facebook may be nice gestures and all, but uh no amount of online signatures asking for their freedom is going to make the North Korean government go, “well gee golly there’s so many people on the internet who are against what we’re doing, let’s release them!”