Journalists are dedicated to exposing incompetence, corruption and injustice, and the worst that can usually happen to Kiwi journos because of that is they might get some mean glances from chief doddard Winston Peters. But in some other countries around the globe, doing that kind of thing is especially courageous, because there is a good chance it could lead to a sudden and violent death.
We're not talking about the tragedy of war correspondents, killed by an indiscriminate shell or a roadside bomb, we're talking about the systematic targeting and execution of journalists for doing their fucking job. The most recent case of such awfulness is in Turkey, where journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into a Saudi embassy to sort out some routine paperwork, and was brutally and cowardly murdered. The details of his death that have already seeped out are truly horrific, and there is the awful feeling that it's far from over.
The death of Khashoggi is going to have some huge political ramifications, especially when the Kingdom is trying to paper over the mess with complete utter bullshit, and raises important questions about the ongoing safety of reporters out in the field.
Reporters, by nature, run toward the dangerous shit when it's all going down, and while that recklessness can produce some incredible journalism, none of it is as important as that reporter's own safety. And even a story that might just be a harmless yarn about some dude who has built a personal submarine can have horrific consequences (and they are consequences that do not in any way need to be dramatised, despite the recent announcement that the terrible death of Kim Wall is going to be made into a six-part TV series).
The world's hot spots are full of people risking their actual lives to get the story out, and often losing them, which is just terrible. And even more worrying is the blind hatred seen in some of the attacks on the general media, which can lead to things like the awful shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in the US, where one fucking lunatic manged to murder a bunch of people who were just trying to do their jobs.
It swiftly got buried in a mound of other mass killings in the States and, as ever, nothing was fucking done about it – that's life in modern America, where the entire country is held ransom by gun culture, which is largely just a bunch of assholes with tiny penises who get off on big bangs. But you can bet every journalist took a moment to wonder about the security in their own office, and how easily some fuckhead with a shotgun could walk in and open fire.
There can be no doubt that the dumb shitbirds who threaten to bring a gun to a newsroom, and those few idiotic enough to carry out those threats, are emboldened by the talk about the mainstream media being the enemy, and trying to destroy your way of life, talk that goes all the way up to the buffoon-in-chief in the White House.
That kind of talk means the blood of the newsroom staff of the Capital Gazette is on the President's hands, just as the blood of Jamal Khashoggi is on the Saudi government's, and if we're very, very lucky, they might actually be accountable for this shit.
But it's genuinely terrifying to see the mob cheer on the US President when he talks about how cool it was that a reporter got body slammed by a politician, and when he says that killing a journalist is probably quite bad, but that we can't let that get in the way of selling billions of dollars in murder machines to foreign regimes.
New Zealand isn't immune to this kind of shit-talk - there are a lot of local journos who will forever maintain Michael Laws is a irredeemable pile of dogshit after he once blithely suggested that somebody should take a shotgun to the offices of the Herald on Sunday. Luckily we don't have that kind of gun fetish culture in this country (despite the National party's bizarre current efforts to create one), and the HOS newsroom was left unscathed. But there are a lot of dangerous morons out there, and no newsroom anywhere is totally safe, from the smallest community newspaper to the big TV studio.
Only tyrants and psychopaths think people should be assaulted and murdered for trying to expose the truth, because the truth always needs to be exposed. Journalists have enough shit to deal with, endless having to adjust to the shifting media landscape and keep their fuckin' jobs. They don't need to worry about being physically attacked as well.
- Ron Troupe
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