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A_Soporific t1_j2aful3 wrote

Reply to comment by xc2215x in Nearly 1,700 journalists killed over past 20 years, says Reporters Without Borders by DoremusJessup

It's actually substantially lower than I'd thought. It's not even one a day. For the whole world.

There are plenty of jobs that average one a day through worksite accidents or exposure to toxins necessary to get the job done. Even being a boring office drone results in more than one suicide or "death by overwork" a day if you're including China, Japan, and South Korea.

Don't get me wrong. Each and every one of those is a tragedy, but the number there actually makes me feel that we're in a better place than I thought we were.

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PrimarySwan t1_j2bd2s7 wrote

Though there aren't a lot of journalists so percentages have got to be high. I bet there are more miners or construction workers or oil rig crews than journos.

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dub4u t1_j2bjb84 wrote

I think it's more to do with under what circumstances journalists die. Miners aren't being murdered, they die in real accidents.

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A_Soporific t1_j2cbcnt wrote

I'm not really qualified to answer that question. Though, I think a fair amount of it depends on definitions. If you include news adjacent talking heads and news-themed youtubers there'd be quite a few. After all, most nations have national and regional government mouthpieces. Then you have major cities and their newspapers, radio stations, and TV news. Even third world places have at least newspapers and radio stations.

But, yeah, journalist isn't nearly as common as construction workers or miners.

I do think that government and organized crime murders of journalists are substantially worse on a pound by pound comparison. It was just happening less often than I had previously assumed.

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PrimarySwan t1_j2f36ap wrote

I do mean proper journalists, not talking heads and all that. The ones who do the work that is then ripped off by 5k clickbait sites and badly misquoted. News hosts can be journalists and often are former ones but often not.

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sephelutis t1_j2bz7c6 wrote

there aren’t alot of good journalists

“Yellow journalists” are most of them these days and they have 0 risk as long as they toll the propaganda lines

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A_Soporific t1_j2ccm36 wrote

Yellow Journalism has always been the default, though.

If you go through lists of small town newspapers you often see them named "Republican", "Democrat", or "Independent" because they were often owned and operated by political parties until the early 20th century when they started regulating such things.

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ctmsansei t1_j2bdawz wrote

well, there are also way more "boring office" workers than journalists in dangerous places.

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