A Dying Breed

When CTV journalist Clark Todd was killed covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1983, the dangers of war reporting were brought home to Canadians. Fortunately, few western journalists are killed on assignment. While much attention has been paid more recently to those who have been killed in the line of duty (Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal and Kate Peyton of BBC News most notably), the number of western-based journalists who die in the field remains relatively small—due, in part, to the reduction of overseas assignments as a cost-cutting measure and to the decline in foreign reporting in general. But according to the International News Safety Institute—a Brussels-based organization that monitors these things—in the past twelve years, more than 1,400 journalists world-wide have been murdered while trying to do their job. Of these journalists, 90 percent were local reporters working in their own countries. As such, we in the west rarely read...