Sustainable Journalism

We had a rather cheery lecture this week from a very experienced journalist who told us we could all get murdered. Rather alarming for first thing on a Friday, but the grim reality is that in some parts of the world journalists are extremely vulnerable to violence.

In Rodney Pinder’s 35 years as a journalist, he has worked his way to the very top. He has covered conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Africa, been global editor of Reuters video news and now is director of the International News Safety Institute. This charity was set up in 2004 as a coalition of global news organisations to give training and support to journalists around the world who are at risk. And that’s potentially all of us.

The point is that you don’t necessarily have to be in the midst of a war zone to get yourself into bother. As a journalist I’ll be wanting to get myself into the thick of it, be there when it happens – but at what cost? Whether it’s a footie match,  a climate change demonstration in Britain, or a military coup in some distant land, a journalist should always prepare themselves for the worst and take the necessary precautions.

Morbidly, on the homepage of the INSI website there is a counter racking up how many journalists have died so far this year in the pursuit of their work. Since the lecture one more has died which brings the tally up to 63.  In a healthy democracy journalists are essential, they are a channel of free speech in the pursuit of truth. In a country with massive corruption and drug trafficking such as Mexico, the torch of truth isn’t welcomed and the light it shines is frequently extinguished. Worldwide, only 1 in 10 journalist deaths ends in a prison sentence.

The lecture kicked off with a film telling us about the death of Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was an anti government journalist and editor of Sri Lankan newspaper the Daily Editor. He was killed in January 2009 but had preempted his murder only days before in an editorial column he had written (read out in video below).

Such is the danger in some countries, and I felt fairly ignorant for never having heard of this man, who for his extraordinary effort and tenaciousness was awarded the UNESCO world press freedom prize posthumously. It is extremely sobering to think that some journalists will die to tell the story, and only goes to show how important journalism is and how much we take freedom of speech for granted in the Western world.