1872 Journalists Killed between 1992 and 2019 | Hacker News Reader

1872 Journalists Killed between 1992 and 2019

cpj.org

100 pointsryanmercer17 comments

One of the first ones on the list from 1992 had an interesting backstory that's still relevant today:

The Turkish government assassinated two journalists [1] [2] for uncovering the fact the Turkish gov (or likely intel agencies) were financially supporting and training Turkish Hezbollah terrorists in their special forces offices. Why? These Hezbollah guys were being used as irregular warfare militia to kill marxist PKK (they killed 500 PPK members), in between their normal terrorist activity of killing regular citizens for being secular.

Then in February 2019 [3] the government decided to let all 100 of them out of prison on some questionable legal grounds (that the old court who sentenced them was Gulen-connected). But when PKK fighters sent to jail by the same court tried to appeal, on the exact same legal grounds, they were rejected. So essentially the current Erdoğan gov's policy is to openly support one terrorist group over others.

This is a classic example of Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes at work, where each one secretly support any number of sectarian groups when it suits their interests, while they ignore any tangental atrocities. Which was the waters Americans/Russians both attempted to wade into and saw it backfire multiple times.

[1] https://cpj.org/data/people/halit-gungen/index.php

[2] https://cpj.org/data/people/namik-taranci/index.php

[3] https://ipa.news/2019/05/22/100-members-of-the-turkish-hezbo...

The CPJ sources don't state the fact that "Turkish Hezbollah" is an entirely different group than Lebanese group. They just say "Hezbollah".

The 3rd source does a better job of explaining who the "Turkish Hezbollah" are. They are indeed a separate Kurdish group located in eastern Turkey.

They are also Sunni Muslims while Lebanon's Hezbollah are Shite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Hezbollah

Interesting to note. Hezb Allah just means "party of God" ... So not surprised there at different groups aligning themselves to the same name.

It's terrible that journalists are killed. Press freedom is extremely important. But if these numbers are correct, they are probably good news. I don't think there has been any other point in history where worldwide just 70 journalists were killed every year.

Again, if these numbers are correct, many other professions are far more exposed to politically or financially motivated violence (and the numbers cover many deaths that are not intentionally inflicted). Another way of saying it is that journalism is generally a very safe profession if these numbers are correct. Also, please note that a large part of the deaths occur in the same few countries.

That's roughly one journalist killed every 5 days..

I was aware that journalism can sometimes be dangerous, what I didn't realize though is just how common the murder (or work related death by aggression) of journalists is.

Many of these are in war zones, quite a few by IEDs and similar devices, but many are stabbings, shootings, show signs of torture, involved kidnap.

What makes this so surprising is the individual risks these people take.

By comparison on average 1,300 truckers die in the US each year out of 3.5 million making it far more dangerous on average. However, that’s spread fairly evenly with only a tiny fraction of journalists entering war zones etc.

To compare those numbers - how many journalists are there worldwide?

However, that’s spread fairly evenly with only a tiny fraction of journalists entering war zones etc.

What's the mortality rate for truckers entering war zones? (Including outside the US, of course.)

This chart isn’t all deaths by the looks of it but deaths in specific violent contexts? So that comparison is maybe not quite as illustrative?

I am only including truckers dying from trucking accidents which seems like a direct occupational hazard. They both die from other things on and off the job.

PS: Automobile accidents are also often a very nasty way to go.

I think it's important to distinguish between journalists who work in dangerous zones and get killed by accident vs intentional killings, usually to suppress the press. There isn't much you can do about the former but the latter is really dangerous and very tempting for authoritarians and others who want to stay in the shadows.

>I think it's important to distinguish between journalists who work in dangerous zones and get killed by accident vs intentional killings, usually to suppress the press.

Which I mentioned in my comment.

The site lets you filter (for motive confirmed), 861 of the 1342 motive-confirmed were flat out murdered with 301 killed in crossfire and 172 on 'dangerous assignments'.

That's 64% and I imagine the remaining unconfirmed motive ones are a similar percentage.

Even if it was 1%, that is 1% too many.

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