Last week, on World Press Freedom Day, we paused to salute the scores of journalists around the world who have died to tell their stories since May 2015. This week there’s a chance to examine this problem more forensically in a new book, Reporting Dangerously (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99). It’s a masterwork of testimony and facts from Simon Cottle, Richard Sambrook and Nick Mosdell; its size and scope offer a chance to be more thoughtful.
For reporters and editors don’t all live in war zones. Almost twice as many die in non-conflict areas – poor, desperate countries where crime spirals unchecked and impunity blankets violence. Take two of the world’s hardest cases, Mexico and Brazil. A 2010 report to US Congress estimated that 22,000 Mexicans had died in drug-related violence over the previous four years. It’s a toll that goes on and on (killing journalists along the way).
But why do we – and Mexico – hear so little of it? A reporter explains: “We get a call from citizens that there’s been a murder on street corner X. If we call the police, they say there’s nothing. The ambulance service says there’s nothing. The citizens are watching the police at the scene examine the body or see the body go into the coroner’s van. The coroner says they have no information – so there’s no story. There was no murder on street corner X.”
And Brazil, if you’re thinking of an Olympic summer, is much the same: only one in 10 murders solved. A recent report tallies 321 cases of murder, kidnapping, assault and harassment of journalists, with the toll continually rising. And the impact is lethal, in turn. Because no one properly charts the killings, often far out of town, no one in the big cities registers their impact.
It’s as though the worst wasn’t happening. Impunity covers sloth and corruption. There is no one dying to tell the story because, in hard terms, there is no story.
