The Dangers of Being a Journalist

I’d like to say a word about journalists.

This blogger would be helpless without them, and if you are an information junky (and if you are reading this blog, you probably are) you would be too.

Even citizens of repressed countries have figured this out. More on that later.

What started me musing about this on August 1 was my inability to listen to BBC Radio News this morning on our local NPR station. The local (WNYC) announcer advised listeners that there was a 24 hour journalists’ strike at the BBC, and we wouldn’t be hearing from them today. But our WNYC reporter didn’t tell us what the journalists are striking about (NPR should have covered the story, and didn’t.) Turns out the members of Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) are angry at around 100 compulsory job losses at the BBC World Service and Monitoring division, which monitors mass media worldwide, as the broadcaster seeks to make huge savings. 

Journalists have a lot to be angry and worried about these days, and losing jobs is just one of those fears.

Losing your life while covering a story or being accused of being an “enemy of the state” ranks a little higher on the worry scale for me. And so it was unsettling to hear NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro report from Benghazi, Libya this August 1 morning that the Libyan National Council (the rebel regime in Benghazi) was convinced that “fifth columnists” (supporters of the regime in Tripoli) had infiltrated the country, that journalists are being threatened and beaten up, and “in one memorable press conference” that Ms. Navarro attended, she herself was accused of being a “fifth columnist” for asking tough questions about the leadership chaos in the rebel regime (a regime that Britain and the United States have just recognized – by the way). 

To get a full understanding of the assaults on journalists worldwide, visit the web site of the Committee to Protect Journalists  which keeps a grim up to the minute death toll of journalists killed in the pursuit of the story. So far this year (as of this writing) the Committee reports 22 journalists killed in 2011, 868 journalists killed since 1992, 543 journalists “murdered with impunity” since 1992, and 649 journalists in exile since 1992.

Those murders of journalists occur in Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Brazil, and…well, read the current sad state of affairs on their site. 

More often than not in one party states, the government attempts to close all media down, or orders mass censorship. In that regard, see what China is doing to stop reporting and discussion of the recent high speed train crash.

And in this One World, our only hope of finding out what is really going in a given area often falls to brave users of the Internet, who report on Facebook, Twitter, and post videos to You Tube. That’s how China’s citizens are fighting back, and that’s how brave video bloggers in Syria are fighting back – posting videos on You Tube of the brutal repression the Syrian government is visiting upon its own citizens – literally waging war on them with tanks and artillery and other brutal weapons. The videos are the only way the rest of the world knows the extent of the Syrian government’s cruelty

It is the story not written or telecast, the journalist no longer alive, the journalist in fear of his or her life, the journalist no longer employed, that shuts down our understanding of what is going on in the world around us.

In this One World, ignorance is NOT bliss. It can be fatal.