Why there is no culture of journalists' safety

As I am writing this, the United Nations has counted 68 journalists killed in the line of duty around the world in 2018 (UNESCO, 2018a). That is nothing unusual. From 2012 to 2016, 530 journalists died on the job - an average of two per week. Very few of these are accidental deaths. Some are killed in hostile frontlines, where the risks of working in a place with bits of metal flying through the air at supersonic speeds are self-evident. But many more are singled out, murdered specifically for their work. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that since it started counting the dead in 1992, it has found 1322 cases where the motive was clearly linked to the journalists’ work. However, the CPJ’s numbers are almost certainly an underestimate. It uses a very conservative definition of “journalist”, excluding bloggers, citizen journalists, or support staff.