How to stop the slaughter of journalists.

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Harold Evans

“The price of truth has gone up grievously,” said Harold Evans, editor-at-large at The Week, in the London Observer. All over the world, reporters and media staffers are being murdered at a rate of two a week: 1,000 of them have died in the past decade. These people—editors, reporters, translators, fixers, drivers, support staff—were targeted for assassination because of their work. They may have been covering government corruption, or criminal gangs, or shady business dealings. Most of the killings are seen as local crimes, unworthy of international attention. Only when a high-profile reporter such as Russia’s Anna Politkovskaya or America’s Daniel Pearl is killed does the world muster a temporary outrage. We can change this travesty. Governments and pressure groups can start holding the states that fail to prosecute the killers “responsible for their negligence and, in many cases, complicity.” And the press can remind the public why press freedom is vital to democracy, by vigorously pursuing objectivity and truth. Every time a reporter “slants the facts” or a news outlet “puts excessive profit before excellence,” we have betrayed “those who gave their lives in the course of letting us see.”