Clear, present danger

Is any story worth risking a life for? Journalists grapple with that question whenever they find themselves in a place or situation where their duty to the integrity of their reportage also means putting their lives on the line. To seek the truth and report about it sometimes mean butting heads with those who’d find such truth-telling injurious to their own interests—not least, say, the well-armed government of a country desperate to hide from the world the oppression and violence it imposes on its unarmed citizenry.

Just as often, however, such formidable hurdles as war, revolution, state-sponsored lawlessness and the active and violent suppression of a free press have not prevented the world’s best and bravest journalists from remaining committed to their work. Many continue to head out to treacherous territories anywhere on the planet where they feel they can help bring the true story out, no matter the odds.

Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik embody that extraordinary ethic. Colvin, an American correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Ochlik, a young French photographer, were recently killed when the makeshift media center they were staying in at the besieged city of Homs in Syria was hit by rocket fire. Syrian security forces had been subjecting Homs to continuous bombardment in an aggressive, vicious counterattack against a growing popular revolt aimed at the administration of President Bashar Assad. The deaths of Colvin and Ochlik occurred on the 19th day of the assault on Homs, which activists said had already killed hundreds of trapped civilians.

Colvin’s last dispatch was, in fact, a graphic account of the toll on Homs’ inhabitants—among them a group of frightened women and children huddled in a cramped basement where “the only food here is rice, tea and some tins of tuna delivered by a local sheikh who looted them from a bombed-out supermarket.”

“A baby born in the basement last week looked as shell-shocked as her mother, Fatima, 19, who fled there when her family’s single-story house was obliterated,” reported Colvin. “‘We survived by a miracle,’ [Fatima] whispers. [She] is so traumatized that she cannot breastfeed, so the baby has been fed only sugar and water; there is no milk formula.

“Abdel Majid, 20, who was helping to rescue the wounded from bombed buildings, made a simple plea. ‘Please tell the world they must help us,’ he said, shaking, with haunted eyes. ‘Just stop the bombing. Please, just stop the shelling.’”

Colvin, a veteran of some of the world’s toughest reporting hot spots (she lost one eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka, thereafter cutting a striking figure with her black eye patch), was precisely doing that—telling the world that ordinary Syrians needed help and protection from the brutality of their own government—when she and Ochlik were struck down, along with three other Western journalists who were seriously injured in the attack. There is suspicion that the house they were staying in was deliberately targeted by the Syrian army, to further choke off independent voices giving first-hand testimony on the officially sanctioned carnage happening in Syria.

The loss of eyewitness, professional reporting is devastating—in this case, to Syrian civilians despairing of outside help, to a world deprived of accurate news about an incipient civil war in a flashpoint corner of the globe, and to the cause of truth itself, which is considerably diminished when its messengers are cut down in the crossfire, or worse, targeted for doing their work.

Colvin and Ochlik’s deaths are a reminder of the singular dangers the free and unimpeded exercise of press freedom is heir to. We need not look to Syria and other places to see this first-hand. Just last month in General Santos City, Christopher Guarin, publisher and editor of the local daily tabloid Tatak, became the 150th journalist to be killed in the Philippines since the 1986 Edsa Revolution. Of those killings, only seven have resulted in convictions, mostly of common trigger men, while their powerful backers still skulk in the shadows, out of reach of the law.

The Philippines is now regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists, with the still-unresolved Maguindanao massacre (which includes the unprecedented slaughter of 32 media workers in one blow) cementing the country’s prime spot in that disgraceful list. Whether in Syria or in the Philippines (which prides itself in its democratic revolution), a chilling reality prevails: Freedom of the press, and its practitioners, remain under grave threat.