The Associated Press hyped the global threat to journalists in a New Year’s Eve report from Brussels headlined “Media group: 81 reporters died, threats soared in 2017.” It began:
At least 81 reporters were killed doing their jobs this year, while violence and harassment against media staff has skyrocketed, the world’s biggest journalists’ organization says.
In its annual “Kill Report,” seen by The Associated Press, the International Federation of Journalists said the reporters lost their lives in targeted killings, car bomb attacks and crossfire incidents around the world.
The AP headline is more dramatic and less informative than the IFJ’s own headline for its statement: “IFJ welcomes lowest number of killings of journalists for a decade but warns ’no room for complacency’." The number of deaths as of December 29 was the lowest in a decade, down from 93 in 2016. This could explain the need to balance that good news with emotional rhetoric about “epidemic levels” of impunity for those threatening journalists:
Beyond the deaths, the IFJ warned that “unprecedented numbers of journalists were jailed, forced to flee, that self-censorship was widespread and that impunity for the killings, harassment, attacks and threats against independent journalism was running at epidemic levels.”
Turkey, where official pressure on the media has been ramped up since a failed coup attempt in July 2016, is becoming notorious for putting reporters behind bars. Some 160 journalists are jailed in Turkey — two-thirds of the global total — the report said.
Surprisingly, the AP report avoided any reference to Donald Trump’s alleged “war on the press,” perhaps because it would look silly next to murders and imprisonments of reporters abroad.
How do these media outlets define how “threats soared”? The IFJ offered an Excel spreadsheet of journalists killed, but no actual count or documentation to prove "threats soared in 2017." “Epidemic levels” of “impunity” has no number assigned to it. Part of the “impunity” in these crimes is that one cannot always know if a journalist was murdered for their work ("killed doing their jobs"), or for other reasons.
The death toll has gone down the last three years in a row, but IFJ’s talk of a “safety crisis” continues. The IFJ noted that the decreased number of deaths coincided with the loss of territory by Islamic State, and a stalemate in ground fighting between warring factions in Yemen.
The deaths of journalists illustrate their bravery in reporting dangerous stories, but most analysts would separate attacks where journalists are targeted for their work (like a car bomb that killed Daphne Galizia in Malta) from where journalists are caught in a crossfire or in a suicide bombing. “Impunity” for murdering a journalist in her car is different than prosecuting crossfire in a war zone.
AP also played down the labor union/”social justice” nature of the IFJ. Its own mission statement begins: “The IFJ promotes international action to defend press freedom and social justice through strong, free and independent trade unions of journalists.” It also has a "World Day for Decent Work "campaign page boasting of the need for "strong unions backed by robust and properly enforced labour legislation."
