The New Yorker:

In a sign of our tumultuous times, Time magazine has named journalists who risked their lives taking on despots and dysfunctional politicians —“the Guardians” in the “War on Truth”—as its Person of the Year. It is telling that half of them were murdered. It’s the first time since the magazine launched the year-end feature, in 1927, that some of the honorees were no longer alive. Even more striking, the largest number were murdered in the United States, which now ranks as the fourth deadliest country in the world for journalists—tied with Mexico, where reporters have long been targeted.

Among those selected by Time, on four separate covers, are Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist murdered by a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul, and the staff of the Capital Gazette, the newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, where a gunman, who had harassed the Gazette’s journalists for years, opened fire in the newsroom, killing five. The others include Maria Ressa, a former CNN bureau chief in Manila who now heads Rappler, a news Web site that has tracked extrajudicial killings under Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines. (An estimated twelve thousand people have been murdered in Duterte’s war on drugs.) She now faces trumped-up charges that carry a prison sentence of up to ten years. The fourth cover goes to Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists in Myanmar who were sentenced to seven years in prison for chronicling the grisly killing of ten members of the Rohingya minority. The murderers whom they identified received ten-year sentences.

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