100 Journalists lost their lives this year, up from 87 in 2008
From the Toronto Star, excerpts:
An increasing number of journalists around the world were killed in 2009, a chilling situation that is getting worse instead of better, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression said Wednesday.
This year, 100 journalists were killed in the line of duty because of their reporting, up from 87 in 2008.
An astounding 31 of the journalists killed in 2009 were slain in a single event in November, when about 100 gunmen ambushed a large group of people in the Philippines. The journalists, along with 26 other people, were tortured and killed. The motive appears to have been to stop a candidate from running for election for provincial governor, the Canadian journalists’ group said.
Often times when journalists are murdered it is because they have been writing investigative pieces about corrupt officials or politicians, said the group’s president Arnold Amber. But in the Philippines case, they were slain while attending a news conference, something journalists in Canada and elsewhere do every day.
“There’s no doubt that there was one horrific event,” he said.
“(But) every year is a bad year in the sense of the numbers of people that get killed just doing their jobs.”
In fact, he said, 70 per cent of the journalists killed this year were killed in just five countries: the Philippines, Mexico, Somalia, Pakistan and Russia.
“In many cases it’s done with impunity,” Amber said.
“It’s a rare exception that anybody ever goes to prison for having murdered a journalist in the countries where many of the killings happen.”…
The high tally of 100 journalists killed does not include the scores who have “disappeared” or are in prison, the Canadian group said. Countries such as Myanmar, China, Cuba and Eritrea are not on the murdered journalists list but have large numbers of journalists in their prisons, the organization said.
