The Risks of Reporting the News

There has been a modest expansion of press freedom in the world in 1989, but at least 66 journalists lost their lives in the struggle, a measure of the risks that remain.

Freedom of the press improved in Algeria, Botswana, Chile, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Gambia, Hungary, Paraguay, Poland and Tunisia, by the count of Freedom House in New York City. But there was a deterioration in China, El Salvador, Nigeria, Panama, Sudan and Suriname. Violence centered in Colombia where 20 journalists have been killed in the power struggle being waged by illicit drug cartels. A total of 87 journalists have been killed in Colombia in this decade. The report from Freedom House includes an ominous warning from Luis Gabriel Cano of El Espectador, a newspaper in Medellin bombed last autumn. He predicted that “the drug Mafia’s terrorism someday will extend to all newspapers published in the free world” if it is not resisted.

High death tolls were also reported in Peru, 7; Sri Lanka and Iran, 5 each; Brazil and El Salvador, 4 each, and Indonesia, with 3. Some of those killed were caught in the cross-fire of warfare, including three in recent days in Romania as the army fought to control the secret police. Repression of the press also included 324 arrests, 1,045 cases of attack or harassment in a total of 84 nations and 31 kidnapings. In China alone, 56 Chinese journalists have been arrested this year and 23 foreign journalists were mistreated, several of them detained and beaten, one shot, following the army’s brutal suppression of student freedom demonstrations in Tien An Men Square of Beijing.

Nevertheless, improvements in press freedom were startling, notably in Eastern Europe, but also in South Africa where state television covered an Africa National Congress rally in Soweto in October, only weeks after the government had barred press coverage of other ANC activities.