USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
"Dangerous" is a value judgment; the PDF is a report on journalists who were "killed, detained, held hostage, or missing." Note that this doesn't include harassment, another metric that could be possibly quantified and used to inform a theoretical "danger" ranking.
I guess what I'm leaning towards is that NBC News has a lot of spin in this piece. The headline makes you think it's about the US. The lede cites Khashoggi and tries to conflate it with general hostility towards the media in the United States, but his death was a very different situation (and different country!). Then it cites the global figure without saying "worldwide" in the paragraph, while never explicitly saying that the total death count in the US is 6. The report also shows that zero journalists were jailed in the US and zero were taken hostage.
I don't wish to minimize anyone's death. But the piece gives off a feeling that the US is becoming Saudi Arabia, yet the reason it's in this list at all is because of two events that don't really feel systemic: Capital Gazette, and hurricanes. (Could argue that mass shootings feel systemic in the US, but not mass shootings targeting journalists. No, I don't feel great trying to make that distinction.)
ADDENDUM:
How many people are working in the US as journalists? A quick search was tough to nail down. And, even with the mass shooting that hopefully proves to be a statistical anomaly, how does the deaths per 100,000 in the US compare to the 3.6 per 100,000 in the US's workplace at large?[0]
Also, edited this to remove my confusion about where Khashoggi died.
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[0]: https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/01/02/25-most-dang...
"Death count" is a fact, "dangerous" is more up for interpretation. NBC used the latter word that the report did not use, and "dangerous" and "deadly" are not interchangeable.
I have my answer, but I could see you having a different answer based on how you view the populaces and governments and the US as well as the kind of journalism that you want to do. Thus, "dangerous" is a value judgment, compared to "deadly", which is the term the original report used.
Your point seems to be a "what about" China/Russia or other extreme country.
Also, how realistic is a baseline of zero deaths?
>Least likely to die on the job were people in sales, with fewer than 2 deaths per 100,000, and management, with about 2 ½.[0]
Those two salesmen probably weren't murdered, they probably fell down the stairs in the office or were hit by a car crossing the street. This could have happened to a journalist or two this year as well in addition to what's in this report. But while zero deaths is a noble goal, I don't think it's a useful baseline for the profession of journalism. No job has zero hazards.
[0]: http://www.safebee.com/health/most-and-least-dangerous-jobs-...
I agree US is not as dangerous as China,Russia etc but is more dangerous then the rest of the countries, you want to draw a base line somewhere above US "danger" level ,(again keep in mind this is a global comparison of journalists that died at work not random accidents)
Does one incident resulting in 4 deaths constitute a trend? how many journos were killed in the US in years past? What about other countries that were at zero this year? This year's report shows a zero for France, but as another commenter reminded me, Charlie Hebdo had 12 people killed (7-8 could be called "journalists" if you count copy editors and cartoonists) just under 4 years ago. What did that shooting say about the danger of being a journalist in France, and did that constitute a trend? Which country is more dangerous - France or the US?
It's a value judgment. This is my point.
So we can debate the meaning of dangerous or if we need 1% of jorunalists to be killed before you consider it a dangerous job but IMO the fact that as a journalists I and my colleagues could get killed with heavy guns because some person is upset is dangerous/risky compared to other countries (maybe compared to US is more dangerous to be a student)
I would argue that mass shootings in the US are a very good reason not to raise any kids here or send them to school here, considering many of those shootings were in schools, and many schoolchildren (or college students) have died in those shootings. In fact, I'd say students are the one group that should be most worried about mass shootings, just judging by evidence.
~130,000 K-12 schools in the US, public and private[0]
94 "gun violence" incidents in schools in 2018[1]. This is "each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week" - so far more broad than mass shootings alone.
Let's say each incident happened at a different school: that's a 0.072% chance that something happens with a gun at your school in a year. If those numbers are the same each year (and that hasn't been the case; 2018 is higher than normal), it's a ~1% chance that something happens at your school over 13 years of schooling. Without doing a ton of research, I'm sure the odds would be much more or less depending on the school you pick.
Is that enough for you to keep your kid out of school? That's for you to decide. But bringing it back to my point - evaluating the risk isn't as simple as giving a body count, making "dangerous" a subjective term.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/10/18134232/gun-violence-schools...
In fact, I don't think any of the mass shootings in American schools have been in poor schools at all. Of course, they have their own problems with violence stemming from gang activity and poverty, but the mass shootings are in schools with pretty well-off students.
Compare this to other countries like Germany or Japan. What are the chances that your schoolkid is going to experience any kind of violence on that level in schools there? Virtually zero.
Take a look at the murder rate for the US and compare to Japan's. For the US, it was 17,250 murders in 2016, a rate of 5.35 (per 100k people). In Germany, they had 963 murders in 2016, a rate of 1.18. In Japan, they had 362 murders in 2016, a rate of 0.28. The US had 4.5 times Germany's murder rate, and over 19 times Japan's!
I'd say it's outright lunacy to think that the US isn't a very dangerous country to live in. Just check out the rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
The US is ranking alongside such nations as Sudan, Ecuador, Argentina, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Kenya. Even North Korea has a lower murder rate; Turkey, India, Rwanda, Egypt, and Iran have significantly lower murder rates than the US. China is downright safe with a murder rate of only 0.62! (Of course, the pollution will probably kill you early there...)
I think the statistics clearly show the US is not a very safe place to live: murder rate, mass shooting rates, gun violence rates, etc. are all extremely high in the US compared to developed nations. And it's likely to get worse, as our elections have shown.
Do you live in the US? I do, and I've never felt unsafe in any of the places I've lived in. Maybe I'm 4-5x more likely to be murdered here compared to Germany, but a 0.00535% chance of getting murdered this year doesn't really move the needle for me. I also know that there are wide variances in that rate based on the community I live in, the people I associate with, and the activities in which I partake.
If you think you'd feel safer in North Korea because the murder rate is lower, feel free to live there instead! I'll take my chances here.
And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. If you use per capita figures instead, in the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. (I totally cherry picked Norway, bad me! Though I could have also used France, which also had more per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US in the last five years.)
Now it's still an absolute tragedy, but on the list of things to worry about, your child being killed in a mass elementary school shooting in the US is about an order of magnitude less likely that you being struck and killed by lighting.
Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan.
I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s
The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.
Mass violence against students is hardly a phenomenon that's exclusive to the US.
See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-kinderga... for a recent example.
If you somehow think a nutcase with a knife can do as much damage as a nutcase with an assault rifle, I don't know how to help you.
The full PDF report is much more interesting than the article. https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf
The report also notes that worldwide journalist deaths are down, and for the first time in 15 years, no journalist deaths in Iraq.
The Annapolis shooting to be precise.
>Meanwhile, the shooting deaths of five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in June propelled the United States into the ranks of the most dangerous countries for the first time.