Scary Precedent - 40 News Organizations in Collusion to Suppress News Story

We all found out yesterday that the New York Times successfully asked 40 other news organizations to suppress a news story about one of their kidnapped reporters for the last 7 months. I completely understand them wanting to protect their employee and not endanger him, but this is a very scary example of a double standard that is unacceptable.

I am concerned that a "monopoly" of news organizations could essentially get together and create an anti-trust situation, where they would collectively decide what "news" should or should not be disseminated. I am not naive about the fact that most news IS manipulated in some form, but the suppression of information by a collective of news organizations in a variety of countries is a little too much to ignore. They even got some bloggers to remove their posts on the subject.

I question the subjectiveness of their actions; would they have done the same thing if it had been a politician or business person that had been kidnapped instead of a reporter? I doubt it.

Your thoughts?