Writer: Odoobo C. Bichachi. PHOTO/COURTESY
At least one hundred and twenty-two (122) journalists and media workers, including 14 women, were killed in 2024, according to the annual “Killed List” released by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) on December 31, 2024.
This is two up from 2023 when at least 120 journalists and media workers were killed (IFJ).Most of the deaths in both years were in the Middle East conflict between Palestine and Israel. In 2023, four (4) journalists were killed in the parallel conflict in Europe between Russia and Ukraine.
Last year’s disaggregated figures by IFJ were not available by the time of writing this column.In terms of imprisonment, at least 779 journalists were jailed at some point in 2023 and almost 550 spent the start of 2024 in prison, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) or Reporters without Boundaries.
Nearly half of them were detained in just four countries – China, Myanmar, Belarus and Vietnam.The difficult and often deadly working environment notwithstanding, the media market and landscape remained challenging in 2024.
A Reuters Institute report about the things that shaped journalism in 2024 sums it well. The report titled, “How 2024 shaped journalism: insights from the Reuters Institute’s work” highlighted seven areas. I summarise five pertinent ones below:One, “news consumption is going through a challenging platform reset.
The Digital News Report found a significant further decline in the use of Facebook for news and a growing reliance on a range of alternatives, including private messaging apps and video networks.”Still, Facebook (26 percent), YouTube (22 percent), WhatsApp (16 percent), Instagram (15 percent) and X – formerly Twitter – (11 percent) remained the main gateway for audiences across the world to online news.
Two, with so much hype and actual signing on of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the media, there’s a lot of scepticism among media leaders about whether it will benefit media economically and whether the benefits will spread equitably between small and big media.Three, “women remain a minority among top editors. Only 24 percent of the top editors across the 240 brands around the world covered in the “Women and Leadership” factsheet are women. When our researchers did the same tally in 2023, this figure was 22 percent across the same markets. At this pace of change, there could be gender parity in top editorial positions by the year 2074!”Four, “many more people perceive news media as [more] divisive than social media.
A recent report on public attitudes towards digital platforms showed that many more people think that journalists (-29), the news media (-27), and especially politicians (-55) divide” [the public] more than the social media platforms.Five, “Trust has declined more in media environments with less TV news use. Analyses showed that trust declined in just over half of the countries covered. It also suggested that trust in news decreased more in countries where TV news use has declined, and in countries where social media news use has grown”.
That said, an important lesson for journalists from the November 2024 US election.According to veteran US journalist Richard J Tofel writing in his blog, “Second Rough Drafts”, journalists needed to have done “more reporting on whether Joe Biden remained physically up to another term. It became clear on the evening of June 27, 2024, at the debate, that he was not. The failure here, again, is little good reporting has been done since then on who around him (including his vice president) knew what, when about his debility.”
He further notes: “Three years from today, with more than a year to go on his forthcoming term, Donald Trump will be the same age Biden was at the debate. He will have lived under the pressure of the presidency for twice as long as Biden, and will have passed the age at which his own father exhibited signs of dementia. Let’s keep this potential story in our sights.”
Will the US media do better then? What lessons do Uganda journalists pick from this in covering our 2026 elections that effectively start in early 2025?
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