Fergie's Tech Blog

Getting Worse Every Year: The War on Journalism

David E. Kaplan writes on U.S. News & World Report's "Bad Guys" Blog:

A hundred dead journalists. Attacks on newspaper reporters, camera operators, and bloggers. Legal sanctions, criminal libel, intimidation, and censorship. Congratulations, world: Last year was "the most savage and brutal year in the history of the modern media," according to the just released annual report by the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

Nearly half of the dead journalists–46 in all–came from Iraq, most of them local reporters targeted by insurgents and death squads. "The murder and kidnapping of local journalists," notes the reports, "made reporting in Iraq possibly the most dangerous assignment ever given to the media."

Also high on the list of deadly sites: Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mexico, which, for the second year in a row, topped the list as the most dangerous place in the Americas. A Bad Guys salute goes to the government of Cuba, which, with 25 journalists imprisoned, is the biggest jailer of reporters in the hemisphere.

posted by Fergie @ 4/27/2007 01:28:00 PM