Time magazine’s person of the year is people of the year this year, a group of reporters the magazine is calling “the guardians” for their pursuit of truth despite personal risks. Murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is, of course, the name we all know, along with the horrific details of his murder: ambushed at the Saudi embassy in Turkey as he went to get documentation that would allow him to marry his fiancee, brutally killed and dismembered with a bone saw by a team of assassins that had flown in for the occasion, the involvement of his nation’s crown prince, and the free pass the Trump administration is offering on his murder.
But Khashoggi is on one of four covers of the magazine’s person of the year issue, because he’s not the only journalist persecuted for his work. Another of the covers is the Capital Gazette in Maryland, where a shooter killed four reporters and a sales associate last July—one of the stories that should have been big enough to define 2018 but instead was soon eclipsed by so many other big, terrible stories. A third features Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, sentenced to seven years in prison in Myanmar for reporting on a massacre of Rohingya Muslims. The fourth shows Maria Ressa, who is under indictment in the Philippines, supposedly for tax fraud but almost certainly because she is a critic of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Neither are they the only journalists who could have been chosen for the covers:
Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam was jailed for more than 100 days for making “false” and “provocative” statements ... In Sudan, freelance journalist Amal Habani was arrested while covering economic protests ... In Brazil, reporter Patricia Campos Mello was targeted with threats after reporting that supporters of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro had funded a campaign to spread false news … Victor Mallet, Asia news editor for the Financial Times, was forced out of Hong Kong ...
They’re all part of a disturbing trend in which a record 262 journalists were imprisoned in 2017, a trend that hasn’t abated in 2018. Honor to them and dishonor to the governments that persecute journalists and try to stifle the truth—ours included.