By Jennifer Nagorka, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – To Daniel Pearl's family and friends, his death was a murder - a brutal, senseless crime. His loved ones will mourn him with a personal, private anguish that only the families of other murder victims can understand.
To the rest of us, who knew journalist Daniel Pearl as name in a news story, his death is something different. It's a political act with at least two goals. The primary goal may have been to undermine Pakistani and American authorities. The secondary goal was to frighten both Pakistani and foreign journalists.
We can safely assume that Pearl's kidnappers have no special love for the idea of a free press. But his killers understand its power. They calculated that attacking him would generate lots of publicity and intimidate other reporters working in the region. Daniel Pearl, the ninth correspondent killed while reporting on the war on terrorism, was slain partly to keep other journalists from doing their jobs.
That's how it always is when a reporter dies because of his or her work. That's why the deaths of journalists are particularly important to people who care about democracy and human rights.
Individual journalists are no more or less important than farmers, teachers, shopkeepers or street kids. Collectively, though, journalists represent an institution that works to inform, and by informing, protect all the other members of society. Without a free press, you can't have a multiparty democracy or any assurance that a government respects human rights. It's almost impossible to expose corruption without an active, independent news media. Silence the news media, and opposition to a despotic regime or a criminal gang will wither.
Every year, about 30 journalists around the world die in pursuit of their profession. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, tracks these deaths, and releases an annual report detailing their circumstances. The 2001 report listed 37 names.
The dead included Candelario Cayona of Radio DXLL in the Philippines. Cayona was shot four times as he left his home last May. He had criticized local politicians, the military and Muslim extremists on his radio commentary show. He was the second Radio DXLL staff member to be killed. An outspoken colleague had been slain on-air in 1998.
In Mexico, Ortega Mata of Ojinaga, in Chihuahua state, was shot in the head soon after the paper he edited ran a front-page story about drug trafficking. He had also received threats because of plans to publish another story that linked drug trafficking to local political campaigns.
In Russia, Eduard Markevich, who edited a newspaper in the city of Reftinsky, was found shot in the back last September. He had criticized local officials and written about corrupt contracting. He had also been attacked before. He had been beaten in 1998 in front of his pregnant wife, by intruders who had broken into his apartment.
In this country, where democracy is a habit, we forget how daring the ideal of a free press is - or how deadly it can be to its practitioners. Daniel Pearl helped us remember. His is one of the first deaths to go into the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2002 report.
It will not be the last.
Jennifer Nagorka is a writer in Dallas.