The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the dangers journalists face due to their perceived bias in conflict zones.
Salman Rushdie emphasizes the concerning trend of increasing violence against journalists who are often targeted for their work. Rather than being seen as impartial observers, many journalists are viewed as participants in conflicts, making their pursuit of truth increasingly perilous.
In practice
During a speech at a press freedom event, one might use this quote to highlight the increasing risks journalists face.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred.
Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.
I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.
The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.
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