The massacre of 30 media workers in the Philippines last month made this year the deadliest year ever for journalists, a report released yesterday showed.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent press advocacy group, says at least 68 journalists were killed this year, a 60 percent increase over last year, when 42 deaths were recorded.
“What stands out is that three quarters are killed deliberately for their work, and in 85 percent of these cases no one is brought to justice,” CPJ deputy director Robert Mahoney said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “This has a poisonous effect on good journalism.”
Until the massacre in the Philippine province of Maguindanao, where 57 people including 30 journalists were killed, this year seemed likely to end with 38 killings.
The previous one-year record was in 2007, when 67 killings were recorded.
Mahoney said the latest figures still represented a disturbing trend, especially in Somalia, where nine journalists were murdered and killed in combat situations.
Four journalists were also killed in Pakistan, making it the second most deadly country this year, followed by Russia, where three journalists were killed.
Two journalists were killed in both Mexico and Sri Lanka. Other countries with media fatalities were Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal, Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Venezuela.
Fifty-six percent of those killed worked for print media, highlighting the continuing importance of newspapers and blogs in covering important stories that may not lend themselves to television.
“In Mexico print journalists, for example, are the ones who tend to write the exposes on organized crime and drug trafficking,” Mahoney said. “It’s the fact that a lot of print journalists are doing that kind of work that gets them killed by assassins.”
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