Davemolloy.net

There’s an excellent piece published on The Guardian today, titled “Waking up to press slaughter”. In it, Jim Boumelha, President of the International Federation of Journalists, argues that the press need to take more responsibility for publicising the plight of their own kind, and mount pressure on the international community to combat the targeted assassination of journalists. There’s an interesting point to be made here. From the above-linked article:

For many years the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has been publishing on the first of January the list of journalists killed in the past year, but it’s rare for commentators to show the slightest interest. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record, with the IFJ listing 137 journalists and media workers killed across the world. Only a few newspapers, among them the Guardian, bothered to report it. Imagine if these were killed politicians or killed policemen. In almost every corner of the globe, journalists continue to be targeted, brutalised and killed. Some say they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But journalists have a duty to be on the spot when news is in the making.

On a day when most media headlines and blogs will be devoted to the decision by Google to stop censoring its search results in China, I thought I’d encourage you to read the piece and think about the genuine dangers of a career in serious investigative journalism.

As a teenager, when I expressed an interest in journalism, family members warned of the dangers of the profession (naturally, following on from the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996). However, I had always thought of that as an isolated case; I assumed that most journalists died in wart reporting. Not so, says Boumelha:

Contrary to common belief, most are not killed in war, and most are not foreign correspondents. Only one in four died in armed conflict and the great majority fell in peace time in their own countries, attempting to cover serious issues such as politics, crime or corruption. Two thirds of the fallen journalists were murdered – silenced because they tried to expose wrongdoings.

And, to add to the problem, the murderers are rarely, if ever, caught or convicted. Boumelha argues that there is an apathy of sorts towards the journalistic community, and that even journalists themselves ignore the issue. Serious issues that require true investigative work and nerves of steel- crime, drugs, foreign correspondence- have always been glorified as some sort of magic “fast track” in the industry, and carry a kind of glamorous, dangerous style with them. But those dangers are more real than, I feel, we young aspiring journalist types often realise, and it’s this type of thing that we should read and remember.

And for those cynics among us, who think this is just hopping on the media cycle following the death of Rupert Hamer, sure, I’d agree. But the point is still important. From the Guardian pieces’ comments section:

In Mexico people rely on reading information written by journalists and hearing radio news reporters to find out which roads in Chiapas have the highest rates of armed road blocked robbery AND whether or not the robbery is just money and valuables OR are women targeted for rape.

In the north and border regions we read about where and why machine gunnings happen because the weapon of choice here for the cartel gunmen is an AK47 and I believe a bullet from an AK47 can travel a kilometre and still kill.

After a chief of police and later 3 local small political appointees were machine gunned to death near my house I have changed my route to work and no longer shop in my local store. I and my neighbours park our cars in the street not in the garage to form a buffer between our houses and the street.

Without journalists I wouldn’t be able to make these decisions.

Bit of perspective, eh?