Abducted, Beaten, Beheaded—Journalists Lived Dangerously in 2014
By Gary Feuerberg, Epoch Times | December 28, 2014
The two leading international organizations that monitor the freedom and safety of journalists have issued end of the year reports on violence and kidnappings targeting journalists, especially in the Middle East. For just doing their job, journalists can be detained, held hostage, or beheaded. Reporters Without Borders, or Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) tracks journalists killed in the course of their work. In 2014 there were 66. It comes to 720 in the past decade. In addition, 19 citizen journalists and 11 media workers were slain in 2014.
Although the number killed this year is down 7 percent from 2013, the nature of the violence against journalists has changed. In 2014, “carefully-staged threats and beheadings,” were used for special purposes. “Rarely have reporters been murdered with such a barbaric sense of propaganda, shocking the entire world,” stated the RSF 2014 report. Exposed to more kinds of threats, journalists fled into exile in 2014 at twice the number as in 2013.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report, published on Dec. 23, stated that at least 60 journalists have been killed, and identifies each one and the circumstance of death. CPJ will likely add several more to its count as it investigates at least 18 more journalists killed in 2014 to determine which of these deaths were work-related. CPJ reported, “More than 40 percent of the journalists killed in 2014 were targeted for murder. About 31 percent of journalists murdered reported receiving threats first.”
More common than murder is being threatened or physically attacked by protesters or police, according to RSF. For instance, “In China, the Communist Party did not hesitate to use plainclothes thugs to prevent journalists from covering demonstrations,” stated the report. CPJ and RSF may arrive at somewhat different counts for a number of reasons. In Syria, where nearly one quarter of the deaths occurred, the areas that the Islamic Republic controls are dangerous and restricted. At the request of the victim’s family, the cases are often not publicized. Consequently, it is harder to know the precise number of journalists killed or held captive in Syria. Also, CPJ uses a wider definition of journalist that includes “staff journalists, freelancers, stringers, bloggers, and citizen journalists,” while RSF separates the counts for professional and citizen journalists.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1164410-journalists-in-2014-abducted-imprisoned-beaten-and-beheaded/?photo=2
Left: American journalist James Foley, who was murdered by Islamic militants, poses for a photo in Boston on May 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File) Right: American journalist Steven Sotloff, purportedly shown just before he was beheaded by Islamic State in September 2014. (AP Photo) Bottom: Al-Jazeera news channel's Australian journalist Peter Greste at the police institute near Cairo's Tora prison on June 23, 2014.
