In 2022, 57 journalists lost their lives on the job, significantly more than the year before. In 2021 there were still 48 and therefore about a fifth less, the human rights organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Wednesday. Partly responsible for the rise is Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, where eight media workers – five of them foreigners – have died.
However, the most dangerous country was Mexico for the fourth consecutive time, with eleven deaths this year. Six media workers have died in Haiti, according to the “Press Freedom Annual Report 2022”. Nearly 80% of media professionals killed in 2022 were murdered specifically because of their work or the topics they covered. War reporting, investigative research on organized crime, and reporting on corruption are particularly dangerous. The majority of media workers killed are male (88%), with the proportion of journalists killed tripling from four to over twelve percent between 2020 and 2022.
At least 533 journalists were jailed on December 1, 2022, more than at any other time since RSF’s annual reports were published. The previous year there were 470. Just over a third of imprisoned journalists were convicted, almost two thirds are imprisoned without trial. According to the RSF, some have been awaiting trial for over 20 years. “The record number of jailed media workers shows that authoritarian regimes can, increasingly, simply jail media workers, and they do,” said Christin Edlinger of RSF Austria. Every media worker who is “brave, researches critically to inform the population – a human right, mind you – and is in prison in inhumane conditions” is too much, she said in a broadcast.
China remains the country with the most imprisoned journalists. Including Hong Kong, a total of 110 media workers are being held there. In Myanmar there are 62 and in Iran 47. The regime in Iran “only needed a few weeks to take their country to third place on this list”, according to RSF, referring to the massive and national protests in the country. In Russia, where “false information” about the Russian army can carry up to 15 years in prison, 18 media professionals are jailed – including eight from Ukraine.
According to RSF, the fact that 78 women journalists (just under 15 percent of all imprisoned media professionals) are currently in prison represents an “unprecedented increase”, in 2019 it was ten percent. The increase reflects two global trends: “On the one hand, the proportion of women in journalism is increasing overall and, on the other hand, women are not spared from media repression,” according to the RSF report.
Currently, at least 65 media professionals are kidnapped worldwide, the same number as last year. Syria leads with 42 abductees, followed by Iraq (11), Yemen (11) and Mali (1). 28 of the kidnapped journalists are being held captive by groups associated with the Islamic State.
RSF has published an annual report on press freedom since 1995. In addition to the murder, arrest or kidnapping of professional journalists, it also documents media workers such as cameramen or sound engineers and citizen journalists who play an important role in disseminating news in countries with authoritarian regimes and in countries at war. All numbers refer to the period from January 1st to December 1st, 2022 or are snapshots from December 1st.