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Saturday, May 3, 2003 A day's observance for the price paidNews-Journal Editorial In any given month, freedom of the press across the world sounds like an oxymoron boxed in a booby trap. Take last April. In Cuba on April 7, courts handed 28 journalists prison sentences ranging from 14 to 27 years, after one-day trials on trumped up charges in the latest of Fidel Castro's haphazard crackdowns on imaginary threats. On April 19 in the West Bank city of Nablus, Nazeeh Darwazeh, 43, a cameraman with Associated Press Television News, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier, the seventh journalist killed in the West Bank and Gaza since September 2000, when the second Palestinian uprising began. On April 22, China blocked access to the Web site of Reporters Without Borders after the site posted a report on the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident. And at the beginning of the month, Morocco banned Al-Jazeera, the Arab television station that gets it from all sides, from using Moroccan facilities to transmit reports, supposedly because Al-Jazeera had endangered Moroccan security by showing demonstrators opposed to the American invasion of Iraq. Al-Jazeera is also among the many news organizations who lost reporters and cameramen during the war in Iraq -- a sobering list in itself. News media are more pervasive than ever, providing information in cycles sometimes measured in minutes. Media access in the most dangerous spots around the world seems unparalleled. But not without a price. Today is World Press Freedom Day. Yesterday, the Freedom Forum's Newseum in Arlington, Va. (www.freedomforum.org), marked the occasion, as it does every year, by rededicating the Journalists Memorial in the city's Freedom Park. The memorial now carries the names of 1,475 journalists, including the names of 31 journalists killed in the line of duty in 2002 and the 17 journalists killed so far this year (12 of them in Iraq). The causes of death of last year's victims, as always, reflect the various perils of the profession. Victims included Robert Friedman, 51, an American free-lancer who died of heart complications from a rare disease he contracted in India seven years ago while reporting on female slavery in Bombay; Valery Ivanov, 33, the founder and editor in chief of a newspaper in a city 550 miles southeast of Moscow, where he was shot and killed outside his home, apparently in retaliation for his newspaper's coverage of organized crime; Jorge Tortoza, a 48-year-old Venezuelan photographer, shot in the head while covering demonstrations in Caracas; and Jennifer Hawkins, 22, a reporter for a Montana television station, killed on assignment with photographer David Gerdrum, 48, in a 12-car pile-up in a dust storm. Last year's victims also included Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted by Pakistani terrorists who tortured and executed him in Karachi. In a scabrous twist of media power reminiscent of the media savvy of the Sept. 11 terrorists, Pearl's murderers videotaped the execution and mailed it to news outlets. Reporters are murdered, imprisoned, silenced, booted out of nations or frozen out of beats -- if not routinely, then at least consistently by governments and other powers that depend on stealth and deception for their survival. One day a year, it is worth reflecting on the importance (and the sacrifice) of messengers whose work keeps not only freedom of the press, but freedom itself, resonant beyond words and images. |
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