Page 236 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Journal sts n Per l | 1

public. Yet even in America, journalists are sometimes attacked and even killed
for what they have written. In many other countries, where freedom of the press
is not as entrenched as it is in the United States, revenge killings of journalists
are commonplace.
The point of the revenge killing is to punish a journalist for what he or she
has written, and to scare other journalists from pursuing similar subjects. “A
journalist is the voice of his or her community,” says Pedro Díaz Romero, former
human rights prosecutor for Colombia’s attorney general’s office. “To take the
life of a journalist is to shut down a channel of information for the community.
And after one journalist is killed, you may not need to kill another, as a threat or
act of physical intimidation may be enough to send the message to the commu-
nity at large.” Some of the most common places for revenge killings are countries
that have been racked by war—including Iraq, Algeria, and Bosnia. But the kill-
ing of journalists is also widespread in some nations that are relatively stable but
fairly lawless, like Russia and the Philippines.

rEaL PEoPLE, TruE CrimEs
In the Philippines, where more than 80 percent of the public gets its news
from radio, broadcast commentators constitute the majority of victims of re-
venge killings. One of them was Apolinario “Polly” Pobeda, the popular host
of an am radio show in Lucena City. In May 2002 two men stopped Pobeda as
he was riding his motorcycle to work and shot him repeatedly. Pobeda suffered
seven gunshot wounds, including one to his head. On the radio program that he
hosted, “Nosi Balasi” (“Who Are They?”), Pobeda had often criticized corrupt
local officials—particularly Lucena’s mayor, whom the journalist had accused of
being involved in the local drug trade. “My husband was killed because he ex-
posed the wrongdoing of the government,” Rowena Morales says. According to
his wife, Pobeda had received repeated anonymous death threats, including one
about a month before his murder—but he had kept on working.
In Russia, the spread of capitalism has fueled corrupt business deals worth
billions of dollars, with government officials often benefiting from the same in-
dustries they are supposed to be regulating. After the Soviet Union fell apart in
1991, a new breed of journalist was born who after years of Soviet control was
anxious to do real independent reporting. But some of those investigations had
deadly consequences.
One of the most courageous journalists to work in Russia in its post-Soviet
years was Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for the Moscow-based newspaper
Novaya Gazeta. Politkovskaya came to fame for her fearless coverage of two
separate wars in the breakaway Russian region of Chechnya. Politkovskaya in-
vestigated such dangerous topics as the disappearances of young Chechen men,
often without a trace, by Russian soldiers, and of torture of Chechens by Russian
officers. Politkovskaya’s reporting won her awards around the world, but it also
made her enemies. Politkovskaya had been threatened and attacked numerous
times in retaliation for her work. In February 2001, CPJ research shows, security
agents detained her in Chechnya. She was kept in a pit for three days without