More journalists must take risks, says Wikileaks head

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the Guardian:

There has been an unconscionable failure to protect sources. It is those sources who take all the risks. I was at a journalism conference a few months ago, and there were posters up saying a thousand journalists had been killed since 1944. That’s outrageous. How many policemen have been killed since 1944. How many have died in car accidents since 1944? Probably 40,000. Police officers, who have a serious role in stopping crimes, far more of them die. They take their job seriously. They [journalists] don’t take their job seriously. Nearly all of the thousand who’ve died since 1944 have been stringers in places like Iraq. Very few western journalists have died. I think it’s an international disgrace that so few western journalists have been killed in the course of duty, or have been arrested in the course of duty. How many journalists were arrested last year in the United States, a country of 300 million people? How many journalists were arrested in the UK last year?

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