Reporters' lives at risk

Unquestionably journalism can be a dangerous profession. Reporters hunting down corruption or delving into government connections with Mafia organisations are literally putting their lives on the line for their job. The most horryfing current case is that of Jan Kuciak, a Slovakian reporter who had been investigating suspected corruption links between the government of Slovakia and an Italian mafia mob. He was getting too close to the truth. He and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, were killed. The appalling case mirrors the killing of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had also been investigating high-level political corruption. She died in a bomb explosion in Malta in October. No matter how determined these two respective governments appear to be in finding their killers, the inevitable suspicion remains that the reporters were finding corruption tentacles all the way to the top. Then,of course,there was the desperately traumatic case of Kim Wall, the Swedish journalist who went on board a home-made submarine to write about its designer and never emerged alive. She,too, was murdered and the designer Peter Madsen is facing trial for her death. Hundreds of reporters have died doing their job. The majority have been killed covering wars. There is no safe way to cover a war, unless from the comfort of a hotel miles from the frontline. But then that is not war reporting, that's pretend war reporting, and I know of cases where this has happened. When I covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, there was one reporter from an American provincial paper who sat all day in the British army media office in Vitez, central Bosnia, and just rewrote press releases. No doubt he made it sound like he had faced bullets and mortar rounds. But the vast majority of reporters and photographers who I have come across in war zones covered conflicts with professionalism, courage,tenacity and daring. Reporters of all nationalities have died in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria and in many other conflicts in the last 20-30 years. Reporters who investigate government corruption and links to mobsters are like their compatriots in war zones. They are risking their lives for the big story. I was always told that it is never worth risking your life for a story. But that's not the way you think as a frontline reporter, whether in a war zone or in a gangland environment. You assess the risks, of course, but if you thought there was a very real possibility you could be killed that very day and stayed safely at home, the great stories would never be written. Jan Kuciak and Kim Wall and all those who have died in wars doing their job as reporters,I salute you.