For journalists, 1997 was a year of unusual scrutiny—most of it by journalists themselves.
 
Photographers were pilloried for their purported role in Princess Diana's fatal car crash. Editors were criticized for their indefensibly (take your pick) disrespectful or hagiographic coverage of Diana's death and life. In a paroxysm of self-analysis, journalists then assiduously covered the criticism of the journalists.

In editorial meetings and academic conferences, meanwhile, American newspaper editors and media scholars earnestly debated the merits of "public" or "civic" journalism, without ever quite clarifying what this means when translated into front-page agate.

In early 1998, the all-absorbing preoccupation of the press was President Clinton's sex life and—even more—its own reporting on same. Media critics observed that the public seemed at once hostile to the relentless focus on alleged Oval Office dalliances and riveted by the salacious content of the unfolding scandal. News commentators soberly questioned their reliance on anonymous leaks, lamented the overshadowing of Pope John Paul II's Cuba visit and preparations for war with Iraq, and examined anew the ethics and logistics of public reporting on private lives.

Are these the great journalistic issues of the day?

Such concerns seem somewhat remote when viewed from the confines of a Lagos prison, where Sunday Magazine editor Christine Anyanwu is serving a 15-year term for publishing stories challenging the official version of an alleged coup plot, or from a Tijuana hospital, where editor-publisher Jesús Blancornelas recuperated from a machine-gunning by the drug traffickers his newsweekly Zeta so zealously covers.

In Kashmir, local journalists who face violent retribution from all sides in the armed conflict must decide every day if a story is worth the risk of an abduction or a terror bombing. Editors in West Africa and Eastern Europe aim thumb-in-your-eye satire at their presidents, deliberately testing the boundaries of discourse in societies where offending a head of state is an act of treason; many end up in court, bankrupted by huge fines and legal bills.

The professional dilemma for a journalist in Algiers is whether even to try to venture outside the capital to report on vicious massacres, knowing that you risk summary execution by insurgents while you are reporting, and prosecution by the military if you get back safely and publish your reporting. In Chechnya, where NTV reporter Yelena Masyuk spent 101 days as the hostage of a rebel splinter group, the questions for Russian journalists are basic: Do they succumb to the intimidation of terrorists and the hostility of their military, and walk away from a raging civil war within the borders of their own country? And if they persist despite these pressures, who will defend them?

Hong Kong newspaper publishers must gauge Beijing's tolerance for real journalism—fearing that despite all official assurances to the contrary, overstepping certain undefined lines could jeopardize not only their own publications, but freedom of expression for the entire former colony. In countries as different as Indonesia and Cuba and Turkey, reporters seek out alternative foreign outlets for stories they fear would otherwise be suppressed—often working without pay, or bylines, simply to get information out into the world.

The truly critical challenges for journalism today can be found in the scores of countries that are only now slipping free of the authoritarian shackles of the past—countries where reporters can now operate, but where the concept of an independent press is not yet enshrined in law or comprehended by political leaders. In some of these countries, making the problems much more acute, a brief flowering of press freedom in the recent past is being washed away by a new wave of repression and intolerance.

Just by doing their jobs, journalists in these societies are challenging authority and demonstrating to society at large the valueÑand the risksÑof independent newsgathering and commentary. They are fighting openly for their rights, and sometimes for their lives.

They are also grappling daily with fundamental philosophical dilemmas: How does a newly aggressive, critical press expose the inevitable kickback scams, cronyism, and political abuses in fledgling democracies without undermining popular support for the entire fragile democratic experimentÑespecially since most citizens heard nothing of such seamy things when the authoritarians ruled? Is it possible for a young and sometimes irresponsible popular press to police its ethics without inviting official reprisals against colleagues whose ethics are found wanting?

Can a country torn asunder by intra-ethnic violence survive open democratic discourse without restricting "hate speech"—and can it survive as a democracy if the government dictates what can and cannot be said? In a society without a legacy of constitutional and common-law press freedom guarantees, will well-intentioned free-media statutes be used to regulate rather than protect the press? Is it responsible for editors to assign investigative reporters to stories on drug cartels and arms traffickers when the enemies of these criminal gangs are executed with apparent impunityÑand, conversely, is it responsible to succumb to intimidation and leave such stories untold?

Should mainstream journalists in places where the press is under siege unite in defense of marginal muckrakers or firebrands who face jail or censorship—and suffer the consequences of perceived association with extremist or even repugnant viewpoints?

Even when the answers appear self-evident, the cost of doing the right thing can be extraordinarily high.

In contrast to their jaded brethren in London or Washington, these editors and writers and broadcasters are quite consciously engaged in nation-building. They see themselves—correctly, though not necessarily happily—as actors, not just scribes. Some unhesitatingly cross a line their first-world colleagues perceive as dividing journalism from activism. Americans, especially, should look back at their own history before passing judgment: Dissident journalists in Zagreb or Hanoi may have less in common with the editor of The Washington Post than with John Peter Zenger or Tom Paine. It is not just that the news media are an integral part of the political process: In some places, they are the political process. In Central Europe or sub-Saharan Africa, where emerging antigovernment forces are fractious or inexperienced, or in South America, where old political parties have been fatally weakened by corruption and compromise, the independent press becomes almost by default the de facto opposition. And those in power respond to that threat accordingly.

These are the people on the profession's front lines, uncovering news that matters, in their own countries and beyond, at great risk to their news organizations and themselves.

It is not as if the rest of us don't have a stake in this. Almost invariably, it is local journalists who alert the international media to what is really going on in Russia, or Mexico, or Nigeria, or Israel, or even China. And in this age of instantaneous satellite feeds and Internet news services, local journalists increasingly provide the text and video we see from the latest global flash points.

The chief concerns confronting many of these journalists are whether it is possible to go with a story and stay in business, or stay out of jail, or simply stay alive. At least 26 journalists were murdered in 14 countries in 1997 because they were working journalists. At the end of the year at least 129 journalists were held in prison in 24 countries because of alleged offenses directly related to their journalistic work. Scores more were threatened with legal reprisals or violent retribution.

These people are the focus of CPJ's work. We have learned that international pressure, from journalists on behalf of their fellow journalists, can be highly effective. "I look at CPJ as a kind of giant crane that suddenly appeared overhead and plucked me out of jail," Ocak Isik Yurtçu told me last year, shortly after a CPJ mission had persuaded the new Turkish government to release the imprisoned newspaper editor and six colleagues. (See "CPJ's 1997 Mission to Turkey: Background and Chronology"). But at least 29 journalists remain in prison in Turkey, plus 17 in Nigeria, 16 in Ethiopia, 15 in China, and 8 in Burma.

In 1997, CPJ put extra emphasis on illuminating and, ideally, reversing disturbing trends in places we view as leading indicators for press freedom worldwide: China, Mexico, Jordan, Turkey, and the Caucasus region. Our findings are contained in the special reports excerpted here. Some of CPJ's work, such as in Azerbaijan and Hong Kong, was largely fact-finding: documenting the details of the life of the daily press under difficult new circumstances. In other cases, such as Turkey and Mexico, our emphasis was on working with local journalists to reform repressive laws, get journalists out of jail, or to keep journalists from being sent to jail.

But the bedrock of CPJ's work are the many specific cases of threats and abuse we document and respond to on a daily basis. They make up the bulk of this book, which we present not as an encyclopedia of press freedom violations, but as a record of CPJ's work through the year. Without this detailed, painstakingly documented case information, and our track record of rapid and effective response to such incidents, CPJ's more analytical work would be an essentially academic exercise.

The hundreds of cases reported in this book represent just a fraction of the year's attacks on journalists and press freedom violations, but we attempt to include the most significant incidents in the more than a hundred countries we regularly cover. In aggregate, these incidents provide a compelling picture of the challenges facing journalists in places where journalism is constantly under siege. They also give a sense of the magnitude of the problem: The cases that CPJ can actively and effectively address are in themselves a small fraction of the minority of cases that we are able to confirm and put on the public record in the course of the year.

The often grim statistics punctuating this book—journalists jailed, newsrooms ransacked, reporters murdered—should not be misinterpreted as a kind of inversely proportional press freedom index. For journalists to get into trouble, there must first be journalists: In truly totalitarian societies there are no independent editors or reporters to attack or prosecute. In Russia today, journalists work under constant fear of legal reprisals, political coercion, and violent attackÑat least 13 reporters, editors, and broadcasters have been murdered because of their work in the 1990s. A decade ago, CPJ had little to report about the former Soviet Union, save for the occasional harassment of a foreign correspondent and the repression of samizdat dissidents. Yet it would be absurd to conclude that were was less press freedom in Russia in 1997 than in 1987. In scores of other shakily emerging democracies, CPJ now has a full logbook of press freedom violations, whereas a decade ago we would have simply noted for the record the continuing restrictions on press freedom and moved on.

Most of the approximately one hundred countries CPJ routinely covers are neither the best nor the very worst examples of journalistic freedoms. We also focus our advocacy work on behalf of local journalists in countries where international opinion is likely to have an influence. That leads to what some governments perceive as a double standard on our part. We pay much closer attention to South Korea, now one of Asia's most democratic societies, than we do to North Korea, one of the most repressive regimes on earth. For the past year, CPJ's highest research and advocacy priority has been the imprisonment of journalists in Turkey, and even some of our colleagues in Istanbul ask why we aren't spending equivalent energy on neighboring Iraq, for example, where an independent journalist would risk not jail, but execution.

We are also often chastised for ignoring the real press freedom problems in our own country. Because CPJ was founded with the express intent of not replicating the work of well-funded and effective domestic journalism organizations, we do not cover the United States—or, for that matter, the other industrial democracies, where journalists also tend to be well organized in defense of their own interests. The exceptions we make are rare. We are vigorous in demanding investigations when journalists in the United States are murdered, an occurrence not as uncommon as is often supposed. We make our views known on U.S. actions or policies which we believe endanger journalists abroad, whether they are nationals or visiting correspondents (an example is the CIA's insistence on having the option to recruit journalists as spies and use journalism credentials as cover for its own agents in the field).

Both are fair criticisms. We concentrate our limited resources on countries where journalists tell us that they want and need international support, and that skews both our newsgathering process and our reporting priorities.

We are also sometimes accused of defending people—the imprisoned, even the dead—who are in the view of some not really journalists. This is a critique we respectfully reject.

Of the 26 cases of murdered journalists confirmed by CPJ in 1997, all but six were the victims of deliberate political assassination, and all were clearly targeted because of their work. This pattern has held true for more than a decade: Homicide is the leading cause of job-related death among journalists worldwide. Accidental deaths while on assignment, including combat casualties, are the relatively rare exceptions to this rule.

Again, it is not the number of deaths that we should emphasize. Thousands of innocent civilians lose their lives every year in civil conflicts, and journalism is by no objective statistical measure among the world's most dangerous professions. What matters is the intent of those murders, and their result. These are calculated and all too frequently effective acts of censorship. The ultimate target is not a journalist as an individual, but society at large.

Governments are rarely directly responsible for these crimes, but governments—especially in self-described democracies—are responsible for aggressively investigating and prosecuting those responsible for these crimes. Yet this rarely happens, and almost never without sustained domestic and international pressure. That is why it is always a priority for CPJ to document these cases carefully, to publicize them as widely as possible, and to hold government accountable. Still, the pattern in 1997, as always, has been one of impunity: Only 5 of the 26 cases have led to arrests, and even in those instances those believed to have ordered the killings have not been charged or even questioned. There were many other cases of journalists murdered last year where there is reason to suspect a causal relationship between the crime and the victim's work, but where governments have failed to conduct even the most basic investigations.

Some of the horrors of recent years abated in 1997, reducing the numbers of journalists killed in the line of duty. For the second straight year there were no journalists killed in any part of the former Yugoslavia, a dramatic change wholly attributable to the Dayton peace process. Algeria, which had seen 60 journalists murdered since 1993—more than any other country—was spared the tragedy of additions to this toll in 1997. Tajikistan, which had by mid-decade become one of the most dangerous places for journalists on the globe, with at least 29 documented assassinations, was also absent from 1997's list. The apparent contract murders of investigative reporters in Moscow and the kidnapping and executions of correspondents in Chechnya had combined to make Russia a nation with an alarmingly high death toll in recent years. In 1997, however, there were no instances where the evidence made clear that a reporter or broadcaster or editor had been murdered as a result of his or her professional work.

Still, the continued inability of the Yeltsin government to find and prosecute those responsible for earlier murders put a palpable chill on Russian investigative journalism in 1997. And the fact that no Algerian journalists were killed last year should not be misinterpreted as a sign of improvement in press freedom there. Algerian journalists continue to function under a virtual state of siege, suffering threats of violence from militant Islamists and threats of legal reprisals from the military government. There are fewer victims in large part because so many Algerian journalists have gone underground, fled into exile, or left the profession entirely, while those who remain on the job live and work under the most extreme security precautions. In the former Yugoslavia, where at least 47 journalists were killed in the past decade, there have been no casualties among journalists since the 1995 signing of the Dayton peace accords. The Dayton accords put at least a temporary stop to the killings. But the press in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia is still far from independent, or free from the fear of violent reprisals.

In every reported case of a press freedom abuse, CPJ must first determine the people involved were journalists and the attack or prosecution was related in some direct way to their profession. This is necessarily a somewhat subjective process. Who is a journalist? For the purposes of our work, we define the profession as broadly as possible. Journalists who are sentenced to prison or targeted for assassination include renowned newspaper editors and struggling provincial stringers, political polemicists and by-the-book news service reporters, star television correspondents and shoestring community radio activists. In totalitarian societies, where by definition there is no independent journalism, dissident pamphleteers or pirate radio operators will be defended by CPJ if punished for what they have written or broadcast. Journalists jailed for campaigning for freedom of expression also get our support: If journalists don't stand up for other journalists who are fighting for press freedom, who will?

We will also defend as journalists those who would not define themselves primarily as journalists: That is because governments sometimes define people into our profession for us by prosecuting them for what they have published in newspapers or said on the radio. If a political leader who pens occasional opinion columns is assassinated, we would presume that the murderer was motivated by politics, not by a specific newspaper piece. Such a case would be a tragedy, but not an entry in CPJ's ledger. But if a politician were prosecuted and imprisoned on the basis of what he had written as a columnist, we would defend the politician as a journalist—because journalism would be the nature of that alleged offense.

It is a painful paradox that as press freedom increases around the world, so does the number of casualties in the press corps. But the multiplying incidents of violence and legal harassment against journalists should not obscure the real news: There is more press freedom and more independent journalists are taking advantage of that freedom than ever before in history.

That doesn't mean that press freedom progress is now a straight, unbroken line, or that it is obtained without a struggle. In part, the story of 1997 was one of worrisome backsliding in many countries where this decade had begun with unprecedented freedoms.

The 1990s have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of independent news media around the world. In scores of countries, regimes marked by authoritarianism or outright despotism were forced to cede power to new, more pluralistic governments which at least in principle ascribed to the notion that freedom of expression is a fundamental right. State propaganda networks were dismantled or transformed into genuine news agencies, while upstart private newspapers and broadcast outlets vied for audiences hungry for real, uncensored news and commentary.

The triggering event was the collapse of Soviet communism, the single most dramatic advance of the century for press freedom. Almost overnight, journalists in the former Warsaw Pact republics began aggressively asserting their independence, and courting an audience that was no longer a captive of state media. In Central Asia, a region that had in its history never experienced an independent press, tiny newspapers and fledgling radio outlets appeared within months of the Soviet Union's dissolution. The short-lived democracy movement in China, propelled by reverberations from Gorbachev's Moscow, revealed a generation of eager, idealistic young reporters and commentators. One of the instructive surprises of this transformation was that so many reporters and editors for Soviet-era state media—whom many Western journalists had viewed not as colleagues but as apparatchik cogs in a Communist propaganda machine—were both eager and able to act as authentic journalists, once given the political chance. This is an important, encouraging lesson for those of us dealing today with reporters for state news services in China, or Vietnam. We should give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not only the Communist world—or the ex-Communist world—was caught up in this revolution. In Africa and Latin America, military dictators and civilian autocrats who had survived by exploiting Cold War rivalries were abandoned by foreign patrons, and then by their own people. In contrast to the Soviet bloc, where independent media emerged in the aftermath of the system's collapse, the local news media in these countries were in the vanguard of change from the start. From Central America to Southern Africa, fledgling news organizations of the 1990s have their roots in democratic rebellions and popular insurgencies of the 1980s. This thawing effect seemed contagious: In the Middle East, the news media in Algeria and Jordan and Yemen became much more openly critical at the beginning of the decade, while in East Asia the best newspapers of Manila and Taipei and Seoul aggressively asserted their independence. Not all of this newfound media independence was handled responsibly: unverified rumors were often peddled as news, and hatemongers in Central Europe and Central Africa took to the airwaves to incite genocide. Much more the pattern, though, was an almost startlingly fast and lasting consolidation of a vibrant, independent, and increasingly professional news media, from Bangkok to Warsaw to Buenos Aires.

Now, however, the distressing pattern in many places is a return to repression. The Algerian military has clamped down on coverage of Islamists and counterinsurgency campaigns. In most of Central Asia the once-nascent independent press has been smothered out of existence by violence and censorship. In the Caucasus, Azeri censors and Georgian hit men keep independent reporters under control. Peruvian journalists again live in fear of military harassment. Hanoi has abruptly turned away from the path of liberalization. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, the once-independent press functions under something akin to martial law. And in nearby Lagos, once home to perhaps the most vigorous press on the continent, journalists are ruthlessly driven underground or into exile. These are the exceptions to the rule, but they are necessarily the places where CPJ must focus its efforts in the coming months and years.

This annual report can be read as a catalogue of horrors, and the physical dangers and political pressures facing journalists around the world are unquestionably acute and increasing. But beneath this press-abuse case log is a substratum of good news: Journalists around the world are defying this intimidation and creating loyal new audiences for fearless, independent newsgathering, and neither they nor their readers will easily tolerate a return to the days of state propaganda and censorship.

This book is a chronicle of resistance. It is a reminder that the highest standards of our profession are being upheld at great personal cost by journalists like Nigeria's Christine Anyanwu, Mexico's Jesús Blancornelas, and Turkey's Ocak Isik Yurtçu. This latest annual edition of Attacks on the Press is dedicated not just to the 129 journalists who were imprisoned at year's end and to the 26 journalists who lost their lives in the line of duty in 1997, but to the hundreds of bold, enterprising reporters and editors and broadcasters who insist on doing their jobs under conditions that would make most of us abandon the profession for dentistry or carpentry. They are paying a price, but they are also making history. By paying attention, by offering moral support, by reporting to the world about them and their stories, we can help them to continue to do their jobs.