It isn't that easy.

The Baghdad foreign press corps rallied to the aid of Christian Science Monitor stringer Jill Carroll immediately upon learning that kidnappers had snatched her in the Baghdad neighborhood of Adil on Saturday, Jan. 7.

Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief Ellen Knickmeyer forwarded to her colleagues the e-mail from Monitor Managing Editor Marshall Ingwerson. In it he requested "off the record, that all media please honor a news blackout on the kidnapping of a freelance journalist earlier today pending further notice. We ask this out of respect to the journalist and the ongoing, intensive effort to free her." [Emphasis added.]

Although the blackout pretty much held in the American press until the Monitor lifted it two days later, some Baghdad hands resisted. On the day of the kidnapping, John Fiegener of Fox News wrote the e-mail list to say the press couldn't treat the Carroll story differently than other kidnappings, noting that the news had already hit the wires. The Agence France-Presse reporter e-mailed the same day, "The item has just come up on CNN. We can't keep a blackout if CNN is running it." The day after the kidnapping, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro sent a measured e-mail to colleagues about her reluctance to play "news police" for very long.

The blackout prompted little discussion inside or outside the press if you factor out coverage in Editor & Publisherand Slate,despite the principles and precedents at stake.

The Monitor's Ingwerson declines to discuss the blackout. "I'm not ready to engage in the debate in a way that would be useful to you," he says. "I'm in the mode of not trying to amplify the story."

The confusion and debate contained in the Baghdad e-mails prove that there is no orthodox, universally accepted method for reporting on Iraq abductions, whether they are of journalists or nonjournalists. "OK, please can you tell us exactly what we can say," wrote one frustrated British journalist to the Baghdad list.

The Italian wire service ANSA, for which Carroll had worked, published her name in a kidnapping account on the day of her abduction. According to the iNoodle blog, Reporters Without Borders posted a story about the kidnapping of a female American journalist that morning. INoodle also linked to a UPI story, and an AP story from Saturday. Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher discovered the Saturday AP story about Carroll on the USA Today Web site that was later deleted. The extreme difficulties of unpublishing a story caused the Monitor to lift its blackout request on Monday afternoon, as a spokesman told E&P the kidnapping story had appeared in 40 to 50 outlets abroad.

Were journalists guilty of treating a fellow reporter differently than they would a kidnapped nonreporter? Were there precedents for such an indefinite blackout? (Ingwerson assures me that he and his colleagues were "checking in frequently" to assess the Carroll situation.) Should the blackout have been observed even though CNN had covered the killing and the foreign press had already published news about it? Editors at the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times agreed to share their thoughts on the issues and their papers' coverage—and noncoverage—of the Carroll abduction.

Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett e-mailed to say the Post delayed the Carroll kidnapping news because the Monitor believed it would put the stringer's life in jeopardy.

"Our experience with kidnappings in Iraq made this seem a reasonable request. It is of course extraordinary for us to delay publication of a newsworthy item or to withhold information about a crime, whether in Iraq or here. In this case, as in others, we tried to balance our responsibility to inform and the interest of protecting a human life. When the critical first period was over, we ran a story on the front page that also informed readers or our decision-making," he writes.