Killings of journalists decline, but 2019 was still a deadly year

PHOENIX – Ahmed Hussein-Suale Divela, 33. Shot to death by two men who escaped on a motorbike in Accra, Ghana, on Jan. 16, 2019. He had been reporting on corruption involving Ghana's national soccer team.

Norma Sarabia Garduza, 46. Shot to death in her home in the southern state of Tabasco, Mexico, on June 11, 2019. She had been reporting on a series of murders and kidnappings in her small town of Huimanguillo.

Saad Ahmed, age unavailable. Died when the civilian convoy he was traveling in was attacked in a Turkish airstrike near the Syrian town of Ras al-Ayn on Oct. 9, 2019, just four days after the Turkish military launched an offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces in southern Syria.

All three were working journalists. All three died in the line of duty. They were among the 25 journalists who died violently as a result of their work in 2019, according to the international Committee to Protect Journalists.

While the number is sobering, it represents a remarkable decline from last year's toll of 56 and is the lowest number since 2002.

However the deaths of 25 other journalists in 2019 are still under investigation, and if any inquiries result in a finding that a journalist's death was connected to his or her work, the toll could rise.

This year's decline came despite the continuing escalation of verbal attacks against the media. But aggression against journalists has left a history of violence abroad and in the United States, tracing back to and beyond the murder of Don Bolles in Phoenix in 1976. The Arizona Republic investigative reporter was killed by a car bomb; investigative reporters from across the country later flocked to the city to continue his work.

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The Committee to Protect Journalists said this year's decline may be attributed in part to more stability in global conflict zones as well as to continuing reverberations from the high-profile killings of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak last year; and the car bombing murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017.

Another contributing factor may be that more journalists are self-censoring for fear of reprisals over their work, the organization said.

The two deadliest countries for the press in 2019 were Syria, with seven journalists killed, and Mexico with five. Syria's total represented a decrease from nine deaths in 2018, while Mexico's toll increased by one. In 2018, the deadliest country for journalists was Afghanistan, with 13 deaths, eight of which were labeled as reprisal killings, meaning the journalists were killed because of what they were reporting as opposed to being caught by crossfire in a war zone or covering a dangerous assignment.

Six of the seven Syrian killings in 2019 involved journalists who were caught in crossfire, whereas all five of the slayings in Mexico were listed as reprisal murders.

The list does not include journalists who died in motor vehicle or aircraft accidents.

Less news from war zones

Maggy Zanger, a University of Arizona journalism professor who has done extensive work in conflict zones both as a reporter and as an academic researcher, said the decline was surprising, given the hostility toward journalists not just in authoritarian countries but in places like the United States and the United Kingdom.

Zanger said one factor in this year's drop might be that fewer news organizations are sending reporters into war zones.

"Some of these regions have protracted and incredibly violent conflicts. Those kinds of areas are less likely to have journalists covering them," she said. "Most news outlets have cut back on foreign coverage, which has opened space for freelancers, but they won't won’t risk it anymore.

"Syria might have been a place where freelancers would go five years ago, but they see someone beheaded, and now there is very little reporting from that region," Zanger said.

"I think we all suffer, we’re all hurt if we’re not getting accurate clear news whether it's from Syria, the Philippines, Yemen or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The whole world is connected. If it impacts one, it impacts all of us."

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According to the CPJ report, 134 reporters have been killed covering the war in Syria since it began in 2011. Ahmed, the reporter who was killed in the Turkish airstrike, was one of three journalists who were killed in Turkish airstrikes in the same week.

Zanger spent four years in Egypt and two years in Iraq, mostly working the Kurdish north. She teaches a class on media and terrorism and one that prepares students to navigate in conflict zones – "how to get into the country safely, get the story and get out."

She said that covering a humanitarian crisis anywhere around the globe carries potential for danger, but that local journalists are at risk as well, particularly those who uncover corruption.

Killing with impunity in Mexico

The CPJ report singles out Mexico as a country where journalists who attempt to expose corruption continue to be killed with relative impunity, despite a special program created in 2012 to protect members of the press.

Two of the five journalists who were killed this year, Rafael Murúa Manríquez and Francisco Romero Díaz, had sought protection under the program, which CPJ described as chronically underfunded and understaffed.

Zanger said the ever-present threat of violence against journalists has a chilling effect.

"It can be devastating," she said. "You need to look no further than our own country to see the impact of the loss of local reporting. Here and globally, the knowledge (citizens need) often comes from local journalists."

"When corruption is rife, people feel much more secure behaving in corrupt ways," she continued. "If you don’t have sunlight on this type of corruption, there's no hope there’s going to be a democratic way to keep it in check."

While all of the deaths CPJ reported this year occurred abroad, the United States has not been immune. Since 1993, 10 journalists in the United States have died violently.

Follow John D'Anna on Twitter: @azgreenday.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 25 journalists who died violently as a result of their work in 2019