The Christian Science Monitor reports that "vigorous efforts are under way on many fronts" to locate and secure the safe release of CSM correspondent Jill Carroll, who was abducted last weekend in Iraq. Link.
A number of Boing Boing readers wrote in to say they'd worked with Carroll over the years, and wished now for her safe return. Leland Schwartz said,
Can you think of anything that can be done to help Jill that the authorities might not activate? I was Jill's editor at States News Service in Washington and would do anything to help get her out of danger. She was one of the brightest lights. (…) I'm hoping they'll fall in love with her and keep her alive.
And Ryan adds,
The pseudonymous Iraqi blogger Riverbend has a moving post up in which she memorializes "Alan", the translator who was murdered during Jill Carrol's abduction. Before the invasion of Iraq, he was the go-to man for Western music, and based on her testimony, was an all around incredible man.
Over on Slate's Pressbox column, Jack Shafer writes:
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.