This Sunday is World Press Freedom Day. Like International Women’s Day, every day should really be World Press Freedom Day. Journalists are powerful watchdogs and protecting them should be a baseline requirement for a free society. But given how woeful the state of media freedom is right now – the number of murdered journalists being at a record high – a day of focus is clearly much needed. So too is a monument. The UK will have its first one dedicated to journalists killed in conflict zones next year, the design of which has just been revealed. Former Index trustee Sarah Sands spoke to us about it. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), run by Jodie Ginsberg who used to to work at Index, is calling for an independent global body to support investigations into attacks on the media. Veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb echoed these calls, speaking days after Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
That there are many people working hard to address the dire situation is welcome.
At Index these threats impact us on several levels. They feed into our campaigning programmes, while the editorial team work with people very much at the coal face. I joined the organisation in 2017 and one of the first articles I edited featured an interview with a Mexican journalist called Javier Valdez. A few months later Valdez was dead, shot 12 times by an unidentified gunman in broad daylight. That same year, and for several years after, I was in regular email correspondence with Andrei Aleksandrau, a former Index colleague and journalist from Belarus. In 2021 he was arrested in Minsk. A year later, another one of our contributors, Larysa Shchyrakova, was arrested. Fortunately Shchyrakova is out of jail and you can read about her experiences here. Aleksandrau is still being held. We also published Victoria Roschyna from Ukraine who was killed in 2024. I could list many similar examples, suffice to say the Index archive is a treasure trove, but it’s also a space where the words of the murdered and the wrongfully detained stand still, ossified, a sad and damning testament to the perils of simply observing.
As I said, World Press Freedom Day should be every day and we work on media freedom issues 24/7. Still, we have commissioned a trilogy of pieces this week with the date in mind: Oren Persico writes from Israel on the media ecosystem there; Nedim Turfent, a former political prisoner in Turkey, talks about the threats directed at exiled media in Europe; and Dahlia Kholaif speaks to people on the ground in the Gulf about how the Iran war has amplified the ugly authoritarian reality of these states.
Are journalists the canary in the coalmine, the first to be attacked during a democratic backslide? Perhaps, though I’ve heard artists and minority groups claim the same. What’s true is that journalists are the much needed fourth estate. They are a vital check on governments and the powerful.
Journalists risk their lives to inform ordinary citizens about what is happening – and they’re now under unprecedented attack around the world. That fact should shame us all.
