EDITORIAL – World Press Freedom Day

In Arlington, Virginia yesterday, 31 names were added to a list engraved in glass. That makes 1,475 journalists from around the world who died of illness or were killed in line with their work from 1812 to 2002. The updated list, displayed in a glass memorial, includes Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was executed reportedly by a top al-Qaeda commander while pursuing a story on terrorism in Pakistan. Still not added to the list are the names of the latest fatalities – at least 12 journalists who died while covering the three-week war in Iraq.

It is not just in war zones that journalism can be a dangerous profession. In the Philippines, around 40 journalists have been killed since 1986, when the end of the Marcos dictatorship should have ushered in a new era of press freedom. Even as the Philippine press enjoyed the end of state control, with some reverting to licentiousness and sensationalism, certain quarters continued to believe that the best response to bad publicity was to shoot the messenger.

The danger persists nearly two de-cades after people power I. Even as the nation prepared to mark World Press Freedom Day yesterday, radio broadcaster John Belen Villanueva was fatally shot on April 28 in Legazpi City, Albay. The next day, broadcaster Jun Pala, better known as the former head of the anti-communist vigilante group Alsa Masa, was also shot and wounded by three men in police uniforms.

It’s not just murder that the international press has to worry about. The recent coverage of the Iraq war, wherein selected journalists were "embedded" with coalition forces for real time coverage of the attack, has raised questions about the objectivity of the press in the free world in times of conflict. An American correspondent was fired by a US network for telling Iraqi TV that he felt Washington had misjudged the determination of Iraqis to fight back. Another US journalist also lost his talk show reportedly because he kept inviting guests who were against the Bush administration’s war policy.

While the free world frets about the objectivity of the press, there are still many parts of the globe without press freedom. The world has a long way to go in the campaign to promote freedom of the press.