CNN’s Christiane Amanpour — the network’s chief international correspondent — told Lesley Stahl in an interview “if I’m kidnapped I want you, personally, to lead the charge and make sure people know about it.”

Amanpour/CNN photo

The comment came as Amanpour and Stahl discussed the New York Times’s decision to hold back coverage of the kidnapping of reporter David Rohde, who escaped from the Taliban Friday night after seven months in captivity. The Times is offering few details about its strategy of silence.

Stahl posed this question during the interview on wowowow.com (The Women on the Web):

Rohde was held captive in Pakistan for seven months and not only did The New York Times, his home newspaper, never report it, The New York Times went out and persuaded virtually every single other news organization, including CNN, not to report it. This is astonishing in every way. What are your opinions on that? Should we have reported this, in your view?

Amanpour: I would love to talk to David about this and see what he thought. I don’t know The New York Times’s reasoning on that and I don’t know what they know that we didn’t know, in terms of who they were dealing with.

Stahl: Let me interrupt for one second. Because Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, said last night that David Rohde thanked him and he was grateful. So that’s what David Rohde thinks. But, of course, no one knew that. No one knew what he thought at the time.

Amanpour: Well, I can only assume that The New York Times wasn’t doing anything nefarious and that they were doing what they thought they should do for his safety.

During the interview, Amanpour made these observations about past kidnappings:

• There are many people who have said, certainly with the Taliban, the more the plight of a kidnappee was publicized, the longer that he would be kept and the more money would be asked for him. That, for sure, I’ve heard for businesspeople who’ve been kidnapped, and others in Afghanistan. I’m just delighted it seems that David escaped. I’m glad he was able to do that. Seven months is a heck of a long time. Remember, though, back in the ’80s when people like Terry Anderson were kept. I think he was kept for six years or so. But there’s a double-edged sword toward how to behave when one of your own is taken in. Some people think that excessive publicity harms them; others think that it shows those people that they’re holding somebody who they need to release; that it is a journalist, that it’s not a spy, that it’s not anybody else - it’s a journalist. It works different ways in different places.

• I think, in these instances, you also have to think about the security of the person involved, and I think there are many people who advise … and we don’t always get it right, but who knows? Look at poor Daniel Pearl - how much publicity was done. I’m not saying it would have worked a different way, but he was beheaded. You know, I don’t know what would’ve happened. On the other hand, Roxana Saberi’s case was heavily publicized and she was released because the president of the United States basically said that she was not a spy for the U.S., and the Iranian government, the president of Iran, Ahmadinejad - who’s now such a lightning rod - he’s the one who told the judiciary in so many words to basically get her out.