Killings of Journalists Worldwide: The Full Cost of a Free Press. An Investigation of the Period 2000-2016.

First, it aims to support international actors active in the field of protecting journalists by providing a meta-analytic tool to enrich existing and complete databases with the comprehensive number of cases of killed journalists across the world. The second aim is to provide insights into the methodological differences, strengths and challenges of and for the international community of actors concerned with the rate, trend, nature and impact of independent journalism when under pressure.

Main Findings

2294 journalists were killed in the period 2000-2016 worldwide. The study found that the number of killed journalists, even when accounting for definitional conflicts, far exceeds the most cited numbers currently in public debate. Despite international efforts to monitor and record the circumstances of death, there are significant gaps in information for which the international community has not yet compensated. Certainly, the role of national governments and the State are here paramount in actively protecting journalists, ending impunity, and providing transparency in terms of information surrounding the killings. There are significant gaps in the information the international community holds with regards the media for which journalists have worked, the stories they have covered and their employment status. Although there is some evidence about the trends of killings of journalists, there is little information about the conditions under which they moved into assignments. For 33 journalists we have no information on gender; 161 of all journalists were women. For 20 per cent of the cases no information could be found about journalists’ citizenship and relation to location of reporting and death. 72 per cent or 1647 were local journalists and eight per cent correspondents i.e. died abroad. We have no information about the job position for three per cent of cases and no information about the type of media journalists worked for, for almost a quarter of the cases.