Even though you would hardly find a year that goes by without journalists being killed for no bigger crime than doing their work and doing it well enough to unnerve some of the world’s most notorious villains, 2020 was still a particularly bad year for this community if you consider the total number of lives cruelly cut short across the world in the pursuit of objective reporting. According to data collected by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), as many as 50 journalists and media workers were killed this year in connection with their work, most of them in countries that were not at war. The data shows a disturbing increase in targeting of reporters investigating organized crime, corruption and even environmental issues, the watchdog noted, while highlighting murders in Mexico, India and also Pakistan. The recent fizzling out, so to speak, of the traditional model from mainstream media space has for some reason been accompanied by a growing tendency to take old-fashioned on-ground reporting for granted. The point is that even if attention has shifted from print to electronic to online media, somebody still has to put in all the work on the ground for even the more modern medium to relay the facts to the world. And just as people now get their news at the click of a mouse rather than having to wait for the daily edition in the morning, correspondents too file their stories using their laptops and smartphones instead of the old wire service. And it still remains a very dangerous job. Unfortunately Pakistan remains among the countries where a bad day for those working in this field could mean suddenly being included in the infamous list of ‘missing persons’ or worse even losing your life. Nobody should need to remind the ruling party about all its promises about just such issues when it was on the campaign trail. So far though its attitude towards the media has been a letdown. Hopefully it will take the findings of the latest RSF report very seriously and do what it can to remove Pakistan from this list.