"When most people think of journalists dying for a story, they picture war correspondents caught in a cross fire, but... Almost three-quarters of the more than 720 journalists who have died in the line of duty since 1992 have been targeted and murdered. The majority of the fallen – more than 85 percent – have been local journalists. Almost all the masterminds of these murders – 95 percent – have escaped punishment."(Terry Gould, Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places)
What makes a poor, small-town journalist stay on a story even though threatened with certain death, and offered handsome rewards for looking the other way?
Over four years, Terry Gould, a Brooklyn-born investigative journalist who focuses on organized crime and social issues, has travelled to Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq – the countries in which journalists are most likely to be murdered on the job – to attempt to answer this question.
In each place, through conversations with their colleagues, their families and in some cases their murderers, he uncovers the lives of local reporters and broadcasters who stayed on a story to the point of death. He searches for the moment in which each of his protagonists understood that they were willing to die, and finds complex reasons for their bravery.
In his wonderfully vivid portraits of seven courageous souls - Guillermo Bravo Vega (Colombia), Marlene Garcia-Esperat (Philippines), Manik Chandra Saha (Bangladesh), Anna Politkovskaya, Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov (Russia), Khalid W. Hassan (Iraq) - he brings their lives and the stories they worked on to light, telling truth to those who would murder truth tellers.
Well done.
