Trump and Putin have made the world safer for journalists - stats

Check out this editorial in the Toronto Star today. That's the Star's editorial board saluting press freedom.

The first four paragraphs make ominous reading. The dictatorial tyrant Putin and the leader of the free world have bonded over many things, we are told, "especially in their scorn for press freedoms."

It gets worse. The two tyrants shared a chuckle at the prospect of "getting rid" of those pesky truth-seekers in the press.

"Their menacing attitude imperils the lives of journalists..."


After that foreboding intro, the editorial board treats the reader to some facts that seem to point in the opposite direction. Deaths of working journalists plummeted 44% in 2019 over the previous year, and are at their lowest ebb in two decades.

Perhaps aware that their first four paragraphs are wishful thinking not supported by facts, they then indulge some sophistry in an attempt to convince the reader that a reduction in journo deaths bodes ill not only for press freedom, but for democracy itself!

"And most menacingly, there has been a two-per-cent increase in the number of journalists being murdered or targeted." Two percent of a sample of 49 dead journos would mean one journalist in the past year was deliberately targeted for their journalism.

One?

The diabolical scheming of the two tyrants notwithstanding, journalism obviously remains one of the safest professions, and editorial board hysteria aside, is getting even safer in the Trump-Putin era.


And they wonder why they are derided for "fake news."