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Heroes behind the words
Tara Kruger
For one year there appeared to be hope that journalists around the world were a little bit safer. In 2008, the number of reporters killed because of their profession dropped to 87 from over 100 in 2007.
As 2009 came to a close that glimmer of hope faded when Michelle Lang, a reporter from the Calgary Herald, became the 101st journalist killed.
“We hoped that the marked decrease in killings in 2008 might be the start of a trend of greater safety for journalists,” said Arnold Amber, president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, in a press release on Dec. 31.
“Instead things just got worse.”
The danger journalists still face in many parts of the world is not only limited to murder either. For political and economic reasons, journalists are kidnapped, exiled, or imprisoned every year. According to Reporters Without Borders, 187 journalists are imprisoned currently in the world.
Reporters facing the most danger are often working in their home countries, trying to expose corruption or give voice to opposing viewpoints. Others travel from far and wide to place themselves in war zones and corrupt nations.
So why would a journalist leave a safe country – where freedom of the press is a right guaranteed in the constitution – to work in a place where murderers often walk free from prosecution? It seems like a no-brainer right?
Perhaps they’re thrill seekers, determined to walk where others fear to tread and come back alive to tell the story. Maybe delusions of grandeur lead young reporters to seek fame and fortune by joining the ranks of the prestigious war correspondents so revered by their colleagues.
More likely, they go because they know there are stories that need to be told. After all, isn’t that why journalists are guaranteed freedom of the press in Canada? Because the public needs to have access to certain knowledge in order to have a functioning democracy.
Lang went to find some good news. The Calgary Herald reported after her death that Lang was on her way to spend a week with Canada’s provincial reconstruction team when a roadside bomb took her life and the lives of four soldiers. She was excited and expected to find good stories waiting for someone to tell them.
“I think a lot of times journalists feel an obligation to tell stories, and sometimes that involves a risk,” said Brooks DeCillia, a CBC reporter who has been embedded with Canadian troops in Afghanistan twice.
The cost of these stories – a ransom paid, a diplomat travelling to negotiate release, a special-ops rescue mission, and sometimes a life – is a price that, unfortunately, must continue to be paid.
Journalists understand the risk and sometimes consequences, but they go nonetheless. And the public does them a disservice by not recognizing the necessity of that choice.
As long as people are listening, watching, and reading what journalists send back to us, and then take that information and act upon it, then everything they put on the line will never be in vain.