Deaths of journalists are of course terribly sad. In some cases, as in Algeria and Colombia during the 1990s, they reflect an active policy to suppress journalism, either by the state or by "death squads" acting on behalf of the state or other forces.
However, most of the 52 deaths tallied for the year 2000 involved journalists caught up as victims while reporting on war, civil conflict or violent criminal behaviour.
Sometimes the reporters were, like Veronica Guerin, singled out for attack because of their work.
Such killings represent significant attacks on press freedom, because they silence individual journalists and intimidate others; but the imprisonment of journalists is perhaps even worse, because it represents the fact that many states believe they can deliberately, openly, criminalise journalism. At the end of 2000, there were 81 documented cases of journalists being in prison, many of them having already served several years.
This is probably a conservative count, but these cases illustrate the sort of laws journalists are up against: in Democratic Republic of Congo, Freddy Loseke Lisumbu La Yayenga spent a year in jail for "insulting the army"; in Cuba Bernardo Arevalo Padron was jailed for "lack of respect" for Fidel Castro; in Ethiopia, Syria and Iran, journalists were locked up for publishing "false information" - guess who said it was false? (And how would the Sun's sports pages, with all their speculative football-transfer stories, ever survive that sort of regime?)
Many journalists in other countries have been charged, on the basis of their published opinions, with "membership of an outlawed group".
In some countries, you need a licence to practice journalism, and even journalists who are freed from prison are prevented from reporting because their licences remain revoked. The Internet has helped dissidents in many countries get a channel to the outside world, allowing information to travel in and out more freely. However, online journalism has certainly not been immune to repression by the state.
In China, where as of last December 31st there were 21 journalists known to be in prison, no fewer than seven of them were charged in relation to Internet activities.
The immediacy of Internet reporting meant that one of them, Huang Qi, was able to tell the world about his arrest in Chengdu, Sichuan province, for "subversion".
Owner of the dissident website Tianwang (www.6-4tianwang.com - with the 6-4 standing for June 4th, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), Huang posted his last bulletin on June 3rd, 2000, just as the police charged in: "Thanks to everybody devoted to democracy in China. They are here now. So long."
