EDITORIAL - A year without journalist killings

For the first time in two decades, not a single journalist was killed in connection with work for an entire year in the Philippines.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported that in 2024, no media worker in the Philippines died in a work-related attack. The development is significant particularly because the CPJ described 2024 as the deadliest year ever for media workers worldwide. The CPJ counts 124 journalists around the world killed in connection with their work last year, with 82 of them Palestinians in Gaza.

CPJ noted that radio reporter Maria Vilma Rodriguez was shot dead in Zamboanga City in October 2024. But the committee pointed out that the gunman turned out to be a relative with whom Rodriguez had an argument over a land dispute.

The suspect in the murder of Rodriguez was quickly arrested by police. But many other suspects in journalist killings – both the masterminds and the gunmen – remain free. Among the most wanted is former corrections chief Gerald Bantag, who has disappeared since being tagged as the brains behind the execution of radio broadcaster Percival Mabasa in October 2022 in Las Piñas.

This failure to bring murderers to justice has kept the Philippines on the upper rungs of the CPJ’s annual Impunity Index. In the latest index, which lists the countries where murderers of journalists are most likely to go unpunished, the Philippines ranked eighth.

For many years, the Philippines was listed as one of the five most dangerous places in the world for media workers and among the worst five for impunity, thanks to the November 2009 massacre in Maguindanao wherein 32 of the 58 fatalities were journalists. Members of the Ampatuan clan are now serving life terms for the massacre – the world’s worst single attack on media workers and the worst case of election violence in the country – but approximately 80 suspects remain at large.

About 200 journalists have been reported killed in the country since the restoration of democracy in 1986. So the absence of a deadly attack on journalists in 2024 is welcome news. The challenge at this point is to sustain this positive development, and to do more to bring murderers to justice.