Last year was the deadliest year for journalists in a decade, with 56 killed in the line of duty according to the US based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The CPJ’s report “Attacks on the Press in 2004” says:
“As in past years, murder was the leading cause of work-related deaths, with 36 journalists targeted for their work. In all but nine cases, the murders were carried out with impunity.”
The report says Iraq remains the most dangerous place to practice journalism, but it also detailed restraints on press freedom and threats to journalists in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
In Iraq, 23 journalists and 16 media support workers were killed while on the job, three-quarters of the victims were Iraqis. At least 22 journalists were abducted by insurgents, and one of them was executed by his captors.
The report says media conditions are deteriorating badly throughout Russia and most of the other former Soviet republics.
“CPJ’s analysis of the 15 former Soviet republics showed that since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, strong press freedom traditions have been established in only three of the post-Soviet states — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Developments in Ukraine offer hope, but elsewhere the press operates with less freedom than it did in the closing years of Soviet communism.”
In Russia, “a midyear purge of independent voices on state television and an alarming suppression of news coverage during the Beslan hostage crisis marked a year in which Russian President Vladimir Putin increasingly exerted Soviet-style control over the media.”
On International Press Freedom Day, CPJ named Turkmenistan one of the “World’s Worst Places to Be a Journalist” because of the government’s “stranglehold” over the domestic media and its persecution of independent news sources.
The countries where journalists were killed in reprisal for their work or in the line of duty are: Iraq (23); the Philippines (eight); Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (three each); India, Mexico, Nicaragua and Russia (two each); and Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the Gambia, Haiti, Israel and the Occupied Territories (West Bank), Ivory Coast, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia and Montenegro (one each).
In addition, the deaths of 17 other journalists in 2004 were considered suspicious but were listed by CPJ as “motive unconfirmed”: these occurred in Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Colombia, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Ukraine and Venezuela.
In 2003, the death toll of journalists was 38 killed in the line of duty and 14 suspicious deaths in which the motive was unconfirmed.