Journalists have become targets of jihadists

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The number of foreign correspondents has plummeted in the past 10 years, and most overseas news bureaus have either shrunk or shuttered their offices. At the same time, increasing numbers of reporters are being killed or kidnapped by extremist groups. No one knows the exact numbers, because families and news agencies are protective of information about individuals in captivity.

We may have come to a turning point in journalism, where the danger of reporting from jihadist strongholds has become too extreme to justify the presence of correspondents.

Steven Sotloff, 31, was the 70th journalist killed in Syria since civil war began tearing the country apart in 2011. That is a devastating number of fatalities for a noncombatant group comprising professional reporters who just want to get the story and send it home.

Despite a heartbreaking videotaped appeal by Sotloff’s mother, the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, beheaded him and posted the video on YouTube. He was the second American reporter to die on his knees in a faraway desert in recent weeks. ISIS also recorded the murder of another reporter, James Foley, sending those brutal images, too, out into the world.

Sotloff and Foley belonged to a courageous band of brothers and sisters who travel the world to tell the who, what, when, where and why of natural disasters and armed conflicts. They do the counterintuitive thing — running toward danger in order to see what is happening on the ground.

A driven group of professionals, they are willing to endure just about anything that life in the field can throw at them: deplorable living conditions, foul weather, loneliness, fatigue and violence. Their goal is to get the most accurate facts and interviews they can and transmit or broadcast the stories, often from the battlefield.

There is the glory, too, along with the guts. And there is glamour as well, and a storied history of dashing correspondents who covered wars by day, hunkered down with troops, and caroused by night in bars from Singapore to Saigon.

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