Journalists die seeking scoops
 Film with Cate Blanchett as Veronica Guerin |
 Veronica Guerin |
|---|---|
 Sander Thoenes |
Seeking scoops can be dangerous, both at home and abroad:
- London's Frontline Club for foreign correspondents has a display of memorabilia, such as the mobile phone that stopped a bullet for the journalist carrying it.
- Reporters often employ local guides or fixers, not just to act as translators or guides but also get them out of trouble.
- Reporters are sometimes assigned ‘minders' from specialised security companies when covering disasters or in conflict zones. These may be ex-army or SAS troopers.
 There was a theory that the 'Couldn't you just murder' book club advert on the back of a Radio Times with a Bond-esque Dando cover might have encouraged a deranged fan |
Since 1992, three journalists have been killed in the UK:
- Martin O'Hagan was killed in 2001 by terrorists in N. Ireland.
- Jill Dando, a London TV presenter, was shot dead in 1999; motive unknown.
- Tarsem Singh Purewal, editor of the Punjabi-language weekly Des Pardes, was shot outside his office in Southall in 1995; motive unknown.
Nearly 800 journalists have been killed around the world since 1992:
- Veronica Guerin was shot in Dublin while investigating Irish criminals.
- Financial Times reporter Sander Thoenes was murdered in East Timor in 1999.
- Four-times world press photographer of the year and Oscar nominee Tim Hetherington was killed along with US journalist Chris Hondros in a mortar attack in Libya in 2011.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger warned that ‘targeting journalism has become a trend’ in November 2012 and stressed the importance of freedom of the press.
Sources and bibliography
- Leigh, D. (2000) ‘Britain's security services and journalists: the secret story’, British Journalism Review, vol. 11, no. 2, pp 21-26
- www.drudgereport.com
- http://frontlineclub.com/
- www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/11/journalists-killed-list-data
- http://cpj.org/
- http://cpj.org/killed/1996/veronica-guerin.php
- Waugh, E. (1938) Scoop. London: Chapman & Hall
- Waugh, E. (2000) Waugh in Abyssinia. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics
Tony Quinn is a journalist on the Financial Times and is Editor and Publisher of Magforum.com. He has received several solicitors' letters during his career (though none ever went to court), reported from Northern Ireland during the Troubles and covered riots in the UK. The nearest he has come to a heart attack was receiving a letter from Peter Carter-Ruck & Associates, the leading libel firm of the times. As he opened it, he saw it was personally signed by the firm's founder Peter Carter-Ruck! To his relief, England's greatest libel specialist and scourge of Fleet Street was merely offering his memoirs for syndication. This article is written from a personal view.
