How did death, jail, abuse and harassment become part of a journalist’s job?
Editorial | Stephen Whitworth | April 22, 2025
Next week, Saskatchewan will mark the annual Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job. On Monday, April 28 there will be ceremonies, moments of silence and a shared focus on making workplaces safer places.
Over the next several days, Prairie Dog/Planet S will publish columns and interviews looking at some of the risks facing workers, Saskatchewan workers in particular.
Today, though, I want to write about something a little closer to home for us: the dangers that reporters, columnists, producers, editors and everyone else working in the news business faces just for doing their jobs.
These threats range from the obvious to the insidious to the ‘wow, I never thought of that’ risks reporters deal with.
Put it all together, and journalism is not a gold-star job, safety-wise.
File under obvious: being a reporter can get you killed. Fans of the Jason Bourne films might remember fictional Guardian investigative journalist Simon Ross, who was assassinated while investigating a covert ops program in The Bourne Ultimatum. Unfortunately, reporting on corrupt, criminal and authoritarian governments can also be dramatically fatal in real life: think of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist killed and gruesomely dismembered after being lured into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The CIA concluded Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who’d been criticized by Khashoggi, had ordered the hit.
Russia, unsurprisingly, is a terrible place to do news. From fatal beatings to car bombs to mysterious accidents involving windows and gravity to the occasional straightforward bullet, reporter corpses have piled up this century. Let’s put some names to the statistics: there’s Victoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian reporter who disappeared in 2023 and turned up dead in Russian detention. There’s Zoya Konovalova, apparently poisoned, who worked for online state-controlled media.
Ongoing Russian abuse of reporters isn’t always lethal, at least not directly. Sometimes it’s perfectly legal — or ‘legal’, anyways. Just last week, four Russian reporters landed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for “participating in an extremist group”. One of them, Antonina Favorskaya, filmed the last video of gulaged dissident Alexei Navalny before he died in prison. Konstantin Gabov and Sergei Karelin worked for international outlets Reuters and The Associated Press, respectively — two organizations one might argue are better equipped to evaluate journalists’ integrity than a Russian court in the age of Putin. The fourth ‘criminal’, Artem Kriger, worked for the independent Russian news outlet SotaVision alongside Favorskaya.
You don’t even have to be in that country. In July 2018, three Russian reporters — Kirill Radchenko, Alexander Rastorguyev and Orkhan Dzhemalwere — were shot by their car while investigating Russian private military contractors in the Central African Republic. On the day of the murders, the journalists’ driver communicated with a CAR police officer who tailed their ride. A CNN report described the cop as “closely connected with Russian contractors.”
Speaking of Russian shenanigans… and then there’s war, which unsurprisingly is also rough on reporters. The nonprofit, independent organization Committee to Protect Journalists, which said more media workers — at least 124 — were killed in 2024 than in any year previous, reports 70 per cent of those dead media workers were Palestinians killed in Gaza.
CPJ reports journalists were also killed doing their jobs in Sudan, Pakistan, Mexico and Syria, among other nations.
We’re living in a world in which unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power are increasingly held by a small number of authoritarians and oligarchs. Journalism is one of the structural forces within civil society set up to oppose their grotesque, self-serving rule. The news does this through factual reporting and rational, critical analysis.
Unfortunately, it’s getting harder for reporters to do their jobs.
The collapse of news media’s business model has starved the industry of the money to invest in professional journalism. Worse than that, in my view, is the manufactured public mistrust of journalism by forces both outside and within. How much harm have populist leaders like Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and, yes, Donald Trump, done to the public’s trust with their spoken (“enemy of the people”), legal and even violent actions against the news? How much online and in-person harassment of journalists have these thugs inspired?
Then there’s the self-inflicted damage profit-motivated media monopolies have incurred by nurturing biased, sloppy, risk-averse coverage, reckless and sexist layoffs (we’re not forgetting Lisa LaFlamme, CTV), program cancellations (CTV again, which killed Rachel Gilmore’s fact-checking segment) and unhappy, mismanaged newsrooms.
We’re at point where factual reporting is dismissed as “fake news” while right-wing phony news outlets like Rebel Media disrupt televised national leaders’ debates before an oblivious public. In Canada, the foreign-owned Facebook literally censors news outlets while poaching their advertising revenues while ordinary Canadians stamped to blame former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his government’s attempt to hold Facebook accountable for its destruction of journalism.
In fact, even as this country unites against economic attack by a deranged U.S. president, more than a third of voters (39.4% at the moment, according to CBC’s Poll Tracker) still favour ‘Maple MAGA’ Pierre Poilievre, a woke-bashing, minority-attacking, sloganeering, reporter-dodging career politician who literally wants to defund this country’s public media.
It’s hard to believe, really. If wanting to shut down public news outlets in a news crisis isn’t a deal breaker to that guy’s supporters, I don’t know what would be. Apparently almost 40 per cent of Canadians are now so misinformed they want to ‘resist’ Donald Trump’s agenda by voting for the political party that has the most in common with him. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t begin to describe it.
Canada, on behalf of reporters everywhere, you’re a tough audience sometimes.
This editorial-turned-rant has wandered from its topic — the on-the-job well-being of media workers in Canada and abroad. It was probably inevitable when Prairie Dog picked its crabby polemicist to write the annual workplace safety series.
Nevertheless, on Monday’s Day of Mourning please spare a thought for the journalists killed, jailed, harassed and abused doing their jobs — reporting facts so that Canadians, and people across the globe, can make informed decisions and hold informed opinions about the troubled world we live in.
