Anyone remember a group of dedicated reporters — for a little paper called the New Orleans Times-Picayune — day after relentless day slogging through the stench of muck and death to file to a Web site that not only informed the world of the horrors they had seen, but also enabled thousands of survivors to find one another? Or the scores of brave journalists risking their lives in war zones across the world, not the least of which are those who survived some harrowing situations in Iraq to report the most important story of our time? Or Nick Kristoff of the New York Times, who has been reporting tirelessly from Darfur, refusing with admirable stubbornness to let an indifferent world forget about the massive human tragedy unfolding there?


But you don’t need to risk your life to do the right thing as a journalist. There is great journalism happening every day, from the recent New York Times scoop about your government monitoring your overseas phone calls and emails, to the Washington Post’s exclusive on secret CIA prisons overseas, to the Wall Street Journal’s series on poverty in America last May. All were superb pieces of investigative journalism — and all were left off the lists of the above-noted critics. There were many other individual examples of great journalism worthy of note: the reporting of Time magazine’s Michael Ware on the insurgency in Iraq, and the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid’s intimate portraits of the lives of average Iraqis caught in the maelstrom of war, to name just a few.


To us, the grimmest news of all — and we must note that it is missing from all those lists — was this: According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 47 journalists worldwide were killed in the line of duty this year — nearly one a week.


Here’s hoping that 2006 will be better.


Correction: This post has been changed to exclude the number of journalists killed in 2004, which was originally reported incorrectly.

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