BBC Cancels Short Story Broadcast: Censorship, or Sense?

The Guardian reports that author Hanif Kureishi - who, among other things, wrote the screenplay for My Beautiful Launderette, accused the BBC of censorship. Radio 4 (part of the BBC) had scheduled a reading of Kureishi's short story Weddings and Beheadings, which describes "the work of a cameraman who films the executions of western captives in Iraq." The BBC canceled the reading because of unconfirmed reports that a radical group had killed BBC correspondent Alan Johnston. The story includes this:"

It seems to me that as a journalist, he would be against censorship," he [Kureishi] said of Johnston, who has been missing for more than a month and for whom fears intensified on Sunday when a previously unknown group, the Palestinian Brigades of Monotheism and Holy War, claimed to have killed him.

Kureishi said: "There are journalists and newspapers in peril all the time around the world. We support them by supporting freedom of speech rather than by censoring ourselves."

I understand the need for freedom of speech, but with freedom comes responsibility. Were it my short story that had received the public axe, I hope I would have understood the motivations of the BBC, even if I thought that it wouldn't help what it was hoping to achieve. Yes, we support journalists with freedom of speech, but if someone has a gun to his head, is it really wrong to avoid pushing the situation at that particular time in the hope of saving someone's life? But then, it's easy to be a principled absolutist when you're living safely away from where the roiling trouble exists.