The fight against impunity and for journalist safety is, as Cooper put it, “a long slog”—but there are some signs of progress. The Austrian government, which was elected to the U.N. Rights Council this year, pledged to carry forward the issues raised in last month’s conference in Vienna on journalistic safety and impunity.
But until governments like Mexico’s decide they want to confront the problem, or until governments like ours decide to impose extreme measures to pressure them to do so, journalists will continue to be imprisoned, gunned down, or beheaded for challenging oppressive regimes and exposing transnational criminal networks and the authorities that defend them.
Important article. It's too bad that Joe Sixpack doesn't care about the journalists who were killed. It's even worse that the news media doesn't care that Joe doesn't even know about their deaths. Surveys by the news media have repeatedly documented the ignorance and apathy of the average American. And comedians are always making jokes about how much the public doesn't know and how much of what they know is wrong. But no one can be a reporter and be so stupid that they can't understand one of the most important reasons for the news media's failure to communicate. A teacher would be fired if her lectures were as unpredictable as the events the news media must investigate. However, this problem would be very easy to overcome. But no one cares. Even the journalists who did prescient investigate journalism on the subprime mortgage crisis, they don't care that their hard work was ignored by politicians and voters. To the people who work in the news media, and this includes the people who work at CJR, journalism is just a game for them to play "gotcha." All journalists are interested in is playing the game and winning accolades from themselves. Our democracy is just an arena for their ego
#1 Posted by Stanley Krauter, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 06:03 PM