A fatal job. How many journalists have to die?

In March 2009 all 39 IPDC council members requested the UNESCO’s director-general to provide updated information on the responses received from member states in which assassinations of journalists had occurred, and to make this report widely available.

According to its website, UNESCO uses lobbying and monitoring activities to highlight media independence and pluralism as fundamental to the process of democracy. It provides advisory services on media legislation and by making governments, parliamentarians and other decision-makers aware of the need to guarantee free expression.

It seems some governments and decision-makers do not choose to listen.

In Fiji currently, it has been reported that government minders have moved into media offices to make sure journalists only write what “the government” wants published. It is preferable to being shot but under such suppression, journalists cannot do their job.

These few examples serve to show that in a disquieting number of countries, freedom of speech and independent reporting are in serious trouble. Reporters there work in peril of their lives.

Media organisations and journalists need to hammer home to the public that some of the news they read or receive in the safety of their sitting rooms may well have cost someone their life. The great, noisy public needs to be roused into action to prod leaders around the world to get these executions stopped.

Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard in the RWB 2008 annual report wrote angrily: “The spinelessness of some Western countries and major international bodies is harming press freedom. The lack of determination by democratic countries in defending the values they supposedly stand for is alarming.”

So, how many more journalists have to die?