A total of 1,000 journalists were killed between January 1996 and June 2006, according to a study released by the International News Safety Institute (INSI) this week.
‘Nine out of 10 murderers in the past decade have never been prosecuted— This is the most shocking fact at the heart of the inquiry,” says Richard Sambrook, BBC global news director and chairman of the INSI study.
In two-thirds of the cases, killers were not even identified.
Only one in four journalists died in war and other armed conflicts while some 657 journalists were murdered in peacetime while reporting on news in their own countries.
‘In many countries, murder has become the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of silencing troublesome reporting, and the more the killers get away with it the more the spiral of death is forced upwards,” says INSI director Rodney Pinder.
INSI is a non-governmental organisation and a coalition of media organisations dedicated to the safety of journalists. For more information on the report, visit the INSI website www.newssafety.com.