97 JOURNALISTS KILLED IN 2010 Two journalists were killed every week in 2010 in a sustained effort to silence free reporting in many parts of the globe, the International News Safety Institute reported. INSI recorded 97 dead in 30 countries, including 85 murders. Most of the victims were not foreign correspondents assigned to war zones but reporters working in their own countries, seeking to expose criminality and corruption. The total was down from 133 in 2009, but that figure had been swollen by 32 news media killed in one incident in the Philippines, the worst single act of boodshed ever suffered by the news industry. "While we welcome a fall in fatalities overall, the sustained underlying level of casualties remains unacceptably high," said INSI Director Rodney Pinder. "It is a terrible price to pay for our news." More than 1,600 journalists and support staff have been killed trying to cover the news since 1996, the base year of INSI's landmark Killing The Messenger report on casualties worldwide. The most murderous country in 2010 was Pakistan where 16 journalists were killed in a spate of violence that has continued into the new year. Mexico and Honduras, with 10 deaths each, have emerged as the most dangerous countries in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico's raging drug wars appeared to be behind most of the killings there. In Honduras, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists points to a climate of violence and lawlessness encouraged by the government's failure to bring killers to justice. Fewer than two out of ten killers of journalists around the world are ever brought to justice, according to Killing The Messenger. Iraq, with six dead, and the Philippines and India, with five each, were the next deadliest countries in 2010. The global death tolls includes only 12 journalists who were not targeted for their work -- eight who died in crossfire and four in accidents, including a cameraman in Guatemala hit by lava and rocks as he tried to film a volcanic eruption. | 
