At least 88 journalists have been killed so far this year, with hundreds more media employees arrested, according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
Over the past decade, more than 750 journalists have been murdered worldwide, WAN-IFRA said in a report presented on Tuesday as newspaper executives meet for the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Hyderabad, India.
Last week’s massacre in the Philippines, in which at least 30 journalists were among 57 people murdered, made up about a third of the year’s death toll and was the deadliest single attack on media workers in history, WAN-IFRA added.
About 35 journalists have been killed so far this year in the Philippines, making it the world’s most dangerous country for media workers.
Among the other countries figuring prominently in the WAN-IFRA report, there were eight deaths recorded in Pakistan, seven in Mexico, six in Somalia and five in Russia.
This year’s total of 88 deaths make it the bloodiest since 1998, still behind the 110 who were killed in 2006 and 95 the following year.
The report said that hundreds of media employees had been arrested in the course of their duties over the past year, with at least 170 still in jail.
It painted a picture of widespread hostility to and intimidation of the press across many different continents.
Among the many problems it cited were the imprisonment of journalists in China, Burma’s mass censorship and the intolerance of governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The report also mentioned the abuse of defamation and sedition laws in Africa, attacks on investigative journalism in Latin America and prosecutions in Europe and Central Asia. – guardian.co.uk