While the largest number were killed in Mexico, because the investigations of drug cartels often cross paths with powerful politicians, many died in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
In its annual “Kill Report,” the International Federation of Journalists said the reporters lost their lives in targeted killings, car bomb attacks and crossfire incidents, The Associated Press reported.
IFJ President Philippe Leruth said that “the levels of violence in journalism remain unacceptably high”.
More than 250 journalists were in prison in 2017, but the majority, some 160, were jailed in Turkey — two-thirds of the global total reported.
Leruth said a slight decrease in reporter deaths from 2016, “cannot be linked to any measure by governments to tackle the impunity for these crimes”.
Two female reporters were killed in Europe — Kim Wall in Denmark, who died on the submarine of an inventor she was writing about, and Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was killed by a targeted car bomb.
Also, an “unprecedented numbers of journalists were jailed, forced to flee, that self-censorship was widespread and that impunity for the killings, harassment, attacks and threats against independent journalism was running at epidemic levels” the IFJ noted.
The IFJ expressed concern about India, the world’s largest democracy, where it said that attacks on journalists were being motivated by violence.
Countries with the highest numbers of media killings include Mexico with 13, followed by Afghanistan and Iraq with 11 and Syria with 10.
Human rights lawyer Paulina Gutierrez told the Medium that murders of Mexican journalists skyrocketed in Mexico last year with 97 percent of the killings that are never prosecuted.
Veteran war correspondent Don North told Consortium News that information warfare has made journalists bigger targets for repression and even assassination.
Reporters Without Borders has mapped the greatest danger zones for press freedom.
Two Paris-based press-freedom organisations launched a project last year aimed at securing information collected by endangered journalists and continuing their work if they are imprisoned or killed.
The Forbidden Stories project by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Freedom Voices Network want to counter the powerful forces that engage in intimidation of independent journalists.
The project is a response to a global surge in violence against journalists. More than 800 journalists have been killed in connection with their work in the past ten years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, listing the unsolved murders of journalists over the past decade.
This year, new murders occurred in half the 12 countries on their index. Somalia leads the index list, which also includes Iraq, Syria, the Philippines, South Sudan, Mexico, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia, Bangladesh, Nigeria and India.
