Chris Cramer: Why do they want to kill journalists?

From a speech by the President of CNN at the launch of the International News Safety Institute in Brussels

The war in Iraq has changed the way we do our jobs for ever. Audiences have been given a new and dreadful sense of what war looks like at the front line. The dangers, the trauma and sometimes the tedium. Now that we have brought them that experience, it's inevitable we will be called upon to do it again. In the next conflict, wherever it may occur. And that means added pressure on us, our staff and the added dangers that come with it.

You will all be aware of the incident in which a CNN team came under sustained attack on the outskirts of Tikrit in the last days of the war. And the fact that their armed escort, in order to save their lives, decided to fire on the car that was pursuing them. Whatever your views about that, we now have to discuss the reality – in fact a reality dating back to Somalia, Chechyna and Afghanistan – that on occasions some of us may need to provide armed security for our staff in hostile areas.

We can all join in a collective tut-tutting and tell ourselves that somehow this is to be condemned. That journalists should never be protected. Should never put themselves in this position. I think it would be altogether more useful if we asked ourselves why we have come to this – why some factions around the world hate us so much that they would like us dead.

Is it just the big media organisations that are seen by some to represent the unpopular governments in the countries in which they are based? Is it just the CNNs, the BBCs or the al-Jazeeras of this world? Or is it because, somewhere along the line, some journalists have surrendered their impartiality? Is it now fashionable to be jingoistic, even xenophobic, in our reporting? Have some parts of the media abandoned the notion that ours is a precious craft, a public and civic duty?