Fallen journalists

Every year between 70 and 90 media workers are killed. The figure this year, up to June 10, stands at 33 and includes two BBC journalists who were shot dead this month. While some journalists’ deaths make big news, the majority remain under the radar. Most killed in the last decade weren’t war correspondents, but local reporters covering crime and corruption. They were killed to silence them.
 

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has thrust the issue back to the fore by saying that people who commit crimes against journalists must be brought to justice. He was speaking at the unveiling of a new memorial to journalists who’ve been killed while on assignment. The monument, called Breathing, projects a beam of light up to one kilometre into the night sky from the top of the new wing of the BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place. Its unveiling comes less than a fortnight after BBC regional reporter Abdul Samad Rohani was abducted and killed in Afghanistan and Nasteh Dahir, a BBC correspondent, was shot in Somalia.

Every week a journalist, cameraman or support worker loses their life in the line of duty. Cases like that of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in Karachi, grab the headlines, but where the victim isn’t a well known Western correspondent the world tends to turn a blind eye.
As the spotlight falls on the risks and consequences journalists face in their line of work, MSN UK News takes a look at how many journalists are killed, where they are dying and how they are being killed. The results are alarming.

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