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The numbers bring you up with a jolt. Of course the gloating video decapitation of Steven Sotloff is barbaric and heart-rending, just like the death of James Foley two weeks ago. So was the beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002 and Ajmal Naqshbandi in 2007. But the journey from Pakistan and Afghanistan across a dozen tumultuous years is still a long one. The threat to journalists and their local guides seems appalling, but not oppressive. And then the columns of the taken start to add up.
Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping often surreptitious score. The CPJ is one of the organisations that try to help reporters in trouble. He makes his own records – and now (in the Columbia Journalism Review) he's started to open the book. Since Syria disintegrated in 2011, Simon says, more than 80 journalists have been kidnapped. At the end of 2013, 30 were listed as missing. Today that's down to around 20: some ransomed, some escaped, four killed.
And examine the statistics for Iraq, 2004-09. Reckon 57 kidnappings of journalists, seven of them Americans, 19 Europeans, 23 Iraqis (mostly working for overseas agencies) and eight others from around the globe. Number murdered in captivity: 17. By the time you've rolled in the full horror of Afghanistan and Somalia, you can sense something beyond two or three sickening videos. This is a plague, a criminal sub-industry, a fashionable mix of extortion and mass murder.
Of course, others suffer the same perils and perhaps face the same sickening end: devoted aid workers, security staff, captured soldiers and more. Journalists aren't by any remote means alone. But – because they are in the badlands to report firsthand, to film close up – they are particularly vulnerable, and their fate is particularly resonant when fear is the terrorists' weapon of choice. Observe how the fate of Foley and Sotloff has turned western public opinion and governments around.
Why does the scale of the viciousness produce such precise surprise and revulsion? Because the video murders seem rare, not part of a pattern. Why, then, didn't we see the pattern earlier? Because (as Simon argues) the pendulum has swung constantly between shouting hard when reporters are kidnapped and keeping their plight under wraps in the hope of secret negotiation. Most kidnappings these days stay deep in the shadows. Some governments refuse to negotiate, some authorise ransoms one way or another. Some kidnappings (like Foley's) raise a brave, campaigning ruckus, and spur an abortive rescue: some (like Sotloff's) are off limits until a fortnight before his murder. Yet death is still the end result in both cases.
Here are some grim questions to answer, then. Naturally, the wishes of agonised families – and sometimes of the professional negotiators they hire – have to be treated desperately seriously. They are striving to save a life. But does keeping these efforts quiet, pretending that someone hasn't been taken, also disguise the depth of the problem – and relieve the pressure on governments to do what they can to help? Does it put others at risk by hiding the extent of the danger? Does it help the killers by making their videos seem horrendous, headline-grabbing events rather than part of a grisly, cynical continuum? Is secrecy exacerbating the crisis – which, for journalists, might mean declaring a story too dangerous to cover?
Simon wants a worldwide media agreement to at least record, in print and on air, the bare facts of a kidnap. He wants the facts out there, not covered up. It's a compromise you can't quite see surviving in a swill of emotion. Yet read Foley's stories from Aleppo or Sotloff's dazzling reporting from Syria's refugee camps. They died to tell us the truth. It seems odd, and oddly wrong, to let more brave men and women like them die in obscurity and denial.
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