Headlines

Decline in media killings not encouraging at all, says RSF

Philstar.com

December 20, 2016 | 10:18am

Decline in media killings not encouraging at all, says RSF

A black cloth is placed over the signage of the Manila Police District Press Corps office to condemn the killing of journalist Alex Balcoba, who was gunned down in Quiapo, Manila in May. KRIZJOHN ROSALES, file

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — A worldwide decline in journalist killings this 2016 is not encouraging at all, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (Reports Sans Frontieres, RSF) said Monday after releasing its annual worldwide roundup on journalists.

RSF said that at least 74 professional and non-professional journalists have been killed in connection with their work in 2016.

Some were killed while out reporting. Most were clearly the deliberately targeted victims of deadly violence, it said.

This is fewer than in 2015, when 101 journalists were killed.

“But the fall is not encouraging because it is due largely to the fact many journalists have fled countries that became too dangerous, especially Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and Burundi.”

These exoduses have created news and information blackholes where impunity reigns, the press freedom watchdog said.

'Deliberate violence'

The RSF explained that “the fall is also the result of the terror imposed by press freedom predators who close media outlets arbitrarily and gag journalists.”

Regardless of their courage, journalists in countries such as Mexico censor themselves in an attempt to avoid being murdered. Of countries not at war, Mexico was the deadliest for journalists in 2016, with a total of nine killed, it said.

Nearly three quarters of the journalists killed in 2016 were deliberately murdered.

In Afghanistan, all of the ten journalists who were killed this year were deliberately targeted because of their profession.

Seven of them died in a suicide attack in January on a minibus used by privately-owned Tolo TV, an attack claimed by the Taliban.

Journalists were also hunted down and slain in Yemen, records from the RSF showed.

RSF has condemned the impunity enjoyed by those who murder journalists and the complicit lack of action by many governments that are often only too ready themselves to trample on media freedom.

“The violence against journalists is more and more deliberate,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“They are clearly being targeted and murdered because they are journalists. This alarming situation reflects the glaring failure of the international initiatives aimed at protecting them, and is a death warrant for independent reporting in those areas where all possible means are used to impose censorship and propaganda, especially by fundamentalist groups in the Middle East,” RSF said.

The group said the UN must have “a special representative for the protection of journalists ... as a matter of urgency.”

Syria, the RSF said, continues to be the world’s deadliest place for journalists, followed by Afghanistan.

Worldwide, two thirds of the journalists killed this year were in war zones. Almost all of them were local journalists, now that news organizations are increasingly reluctant to send their reporters to dangerous hotspots abroad.