Charlie Hebdo: Journalists as targets

"Don't shoot the messenger" holds a grim poignancy after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, but in calmer times these words are usually invoked by journalists as a form of self-protection.

The phrase captures the ideal of the reporter as impartial, a questioner and mere conveyer of facts for the reader to judge.

But sentiment offers little help when the very idea of independent journalism is violently rejected and reporters are made targets.

The United Nations General Assembly last month took the unprecedented step to pass a resolution demanding safety for journalists and an end to impunity following a murderous year.

A total of 66 reporters were killed in 2014, according to the respected tally of Reporters Without Borders.

The danger has always been there in certain countries, especially from dictatorial regimes clamping down on dissent, and the figure from last year roughly matches the average deaths over the past decade.

But what has changed is the way the deliberate and direct targeting of journalists has become celebrated by extremists.

The beheading of US reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff by Islamic State in August are well-known and gruesome examples – but many more local journalists have been killed in Syria and Iraq, regularly working as freelancers without the support of a big media organisation.

This is not only intimidation but a warped view of reporters as a legitimate enemy.

In conspiracy-fuelled diatribes, journalists are presented as complicit with the actions of the state, cheerleaders for corporate control and oppression.

The "embedded journalist" phenomenon, in which reporters are deployed along with military forces, has been singled out.

Plenty of media critics raise legitimate questions around these very themes – but never advocating violence.

Perversely, the dangers have led cautious media organisations with skittish insurance companies to resist sending reporters to some conflicts, making the challenge to official information all the more difficult.

No reporting is perfectly objective and opinion creeps in – what angle to take in a story and how it is presented are all choices based on judgement about what matters.

And satirists at publications such as Charlie Hebdo trade on irreverence, the aim to challenge conventional wisdom or burst the bubble of the ludicrously self-important.

That is why the ideal of media freedom is regularly paired with freedom of expression and a belief this right is universal.

"Regardless of frontiers," said Committee to Protect Journalists director Joel Simon, "a border should not impede the right of journalists or anyone else to express their ideas."

Or to borrow another well-used saying, to "disapprove of what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it".