Vernon Daley

People reading, listening and watching the news are often unaware of the dangers journalists face as they go about the business of keeping the public informed.

In many parts of the world, the risk associated with the job is extremely high and several press men and women have perished while carrying out their role as watchdog of the public's business.

Society owes a great debt to such professionals, especially those covering assignments in volatile communities and war-torn areas.

An interesting survey published last week showed that some 1,000 news media personnel around the globe have been killed trying to report the news over the past 10 years. That's almost two deaths every week.

The survey was conducted between January 1996 and June 2006 by the International News Safety Institute (INSI) - a coalition of media organisations, press freedom groups, unions and humanitarian campaigners dedicated to the safety of journalists and media staff.

Fate

It's common belief that the majority of journalists and other media personnel killed or injured in the course of their work suffer that fate during times of war. However, that's not supported by the survey findings. According to the study, only one in four journalists died in war and other armed conflicts. The other 650-odd men and women were murdered in peacetime, reporting the news in their own countries.

Rodney Pinder, director of INSI, brings home the frightening reality confronted by journalists across the world. According him: "In many countries, murder has become the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of silencing troublesome reporting, and the more the killers get away with it, the more the spiral of death is forced upwards. Most of those killed were murdered because of their jobs; eliminated by hostile authorities or criminals as they tried to shine light into the darkest corners of their societies."

For the most part, we in the English-speaking Caribbean are fortunate to have been spared the extreme violence meted out to journalists in other countries. The brutal murders of five pressmen at Kaieteur News in Guyana last year represented an aberration in our regional community.

Those murders took place during the run-up to the 2006 election and were coloured by politics - whether there was such a connection or not.

In Jamaica, journalists become especially vulnerable in the election season. During the madness, politicians tend to squeal when they think the press has published or broadcast something which diminishes their prospects of electoral victory.

The 'crossfire'

In that environment the media man or woman on the ground, covering the beat, can often get caught in the 'crossfire'.

Reckless leaders have been known to use the political platform to lash the media, unwitting (and perhaps otherwise) prompting their supporters to threaten the life and limb of reporters covering political events. Hopefully, wayward conduct of the kind will have no place in the upcoming polls here.

Mostly, we have had a good record of journalists being allowed to go about their work without serious threat of violence. We should celebrate that and seek to keep it that way.