A NATIONAL BUSINESS REPORTER GETS A SCOOP: The Treasury Department, in consultation with the Federal Reserve, is planning to sell dollars for yen on the foreign-exchange market in order to strengthen Japan’s currency and stabilize exchange rates. The treasury secretary, outraged at the publication of the story, urges friends at the FBI to arrest the reporter and charge him with espionage for revealing a state economic secret, a crime punishable by death. The reporter is held incommunicado, tried secretly without benefit of a lawyer, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. His source is sentenced to fifteen years. A ridiculous scenario? Here, yes; in China, not at all, especially not to Xi Yang, who in 1993 got an analogous scoop from a source at the People’s Bank of China. Xi, a Hong Kong-based reporter for the paper Ming Pao, learned that China was planning to sell gold reserves on the foreign-exchange market. Central bank chairman and future prime minister Zhu Rongji, outraged by Xi’s reports, apparently had him arrested by agents of the State Security Bureau. Xi was comparatively lucky: Protests by human-rights groups worldwide, as China’s takeover of Hong Kong neared, pressured Beijing to release him on probation in 1997 after he’d served three and a half years. But to remind journalists that they’d better watch their step, China denied parole to another journalist, Gao Yu, who was serving a six-year sentence for reporting "state secrets" such as that Deng Xiaoping continued to influence economic policy after his retirement. The cases of Xi and Gao are among dozens brought to us by Anthony Collings in Words of Fire, a compelling, dispiriting, and much-needed reality check on the state of press freedom around the world. There’s been a steady drumbeat of usually convincing, always predictable, books condemning the market-driven prurience and/or the docility of American journalism, among them The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Bad News by Robert Shogan, and Mediapolitik by Lee Edwards. Against the backdrop of all this journalistic self-flagellation comes Collings—a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Newsweek, and CNN, now a journalism professor at the University of Michigan—to remind us how much journalists elsewhere sacrifice to do their jobs. Collings cites figures from groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists and Freedom House, both in New York. In 1999, 34 journalists lost their lives because of, or in the course of, their reporting. In 1994, the number was 72. The total for the 1990s was 458. And even more journalists were imprisoned as a result of their work: 181 in 1996, 87 in 1999. To widen the frame a bit, from 1982 through 1999, 892 journalists were killed, 448 were kidnapped or disappeared, and 4,450 were arrested or detained. Yet Collings argues that press freedom is actually growing. "The cold war is over," he writes. "With it has gone much of the brutal suppression of press freedom by forces on both sides, right and left, ranging from virulent anticommunist military regimes in Latin America to communist dictatorships in what was once the Soviet sphere." He correlates the growing number of democracies—two-thirds of world governments, under which live three-fifths of the global population—with a rise in literacy and a growing demand for objective news. He divides countries into three groups, those with strong press freedoms (like the United States, Canada, Western Europe, South Africa, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), those essentially without press freedom (such as China, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Singapore), and a volatile middle group. It is these "battleground countries," where liberties fluctuate year to year, that are the focus of Words of Fire. Among the most populous are Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Mexico. While their cultures vary widely, Collings points out, the countries in this middle category are by and large "developing nations emerging from decades of one-party or military dictatorship. Often their independent journalists in the past have been associated with opposition parties or dissident groups. . . . Neither side—neither government nor independent press—enjoys unqualified support from all major sectors of society. In many cases, the government controls radio and television but not all the newspapers and magazines." The battleground countries present a paradox—increased press freedom, but continuing violence against journalists. While free nations and dictatorships are relatively stable, partly free nations are often in the throes of social change. "The more movement toward open societies," writes Collings, "the more journalists who try out their newfound freedom." The danger to journalists is greatest in countries where press freedom exists nominally but is severely restricted in practice, either by weak institutions, especially a weak judiciary, as in Peru, Nigeria, and Pakistan, or by pervasive corruption. Consider the case of J. Jesus Blancornelas, a newspaper publisher and editor in Tijuana, Mexico, engaged in a long-running campaign to expose cocaine trafficking by the powerful Arellano brothers. In 1997, soon after his government-supplied bodyguards were removed without explanation, the sixty-one-year-old Blancornelas and his driver, heading to the newspaper office in their Ford Explorer, were ambushed by ten gunmen. Blancornelas, severely wounded, survived, but his driver, hit by thirty-eight bullets, was not so lucky. Nine years before, Blancornelas’s copublisher, Hector Felix Miranda, had been assassinated by shotgun. Blancornelas spoke of his experience with an understatement typical of the crusading journalists Collings interviewed. "I was doing my job," he said. The Arellano brothers "are the news. I am a journalist." The book’s most heartbreaking case of a fearless reporter battling organized crime and, one presumes, corrupt government elements, is that of Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin, who covered Dublin’s underworld for the Sunday Independent. In 1994, after she wrote about the assassination of gangster Martin Cahill ("the General"), shots were fired at her home. Several months later, she profiled the leading suspect in the largest robbery in Irish history, and the next day a masked gunman broke into her home and shot her in the thigh. Though no arrests were made, Guerin persisted, writing simply, "I am letting the public know exactly how this society operates." According to colleague Alan Byrne, when Guerin found out who had ordered her shooting, "she went, on crutches, to see the person to let them know she wasn’t scared." Soon after, when she met a crime-linked businessman for an interview, he "slammed her head against her car and threatened to kill her if she wrote anything about him." Interestingly, Guerin’s confrontational methods were not just a gutsy means of gathering information—Guerin is not portrayed as flamboyant or self-aggrandizing—but a way around the country’s Official Secrets Act, which barred sourcing from government documents. By confronting criminals face to face, she hoped to provoke them into commenting on the record about allegations against them —in order to get their names into print without exposing her paper to lawsuits. You know how this story ends. As she was on the verge of naming Dublin’s three biggest heroin dealers, on June 26, 1996, Guerin was attacked in her car at a traffic light. Two men drove up on a motorcycle. One of them smashed her window and shot her in the face and chest six times. Guerin, thirty-seven years old, died almost instantly. She left behind a husband and six-year-old son. Her murder was greeted with outrage, and her funeral was attended by Ireland’s president, prime minister, and the chief of the armed forces, as well as Dublin’s archbishop. Leading Irish and British journalists vowed to carry on her brand of reporting. But elsewhere attempts at such professional solidarity have fared poorly. The Mexican Society of Journalists, for instance, has had a negligible effect on the prosecution of crimes against members of the press. More than two years after the attack on Blancornelas, prosecutors had brought no charges. Collings’s accounts of these and other cases are gripping. If he can be faulted, it is for being too hopeful. He is oddly intent, particularly for a man held at gunpoint while reporting from Beirut in the 1980s, on drawing a partly sunny conclusion from his research. Thus, he too eagerly takes heart from Internet-facilitated resistance to Milosevic during Serbia’s implosion. He attributes journalists’ defiance of the censors to "that universal human trait of refusing to be beaten down into silence," despite his own ample evidence that self-censorship in the face of dictators and ruthless criminals is actually commonplace. For every crusader who communicates a dangerous truth, Collings gives us a journalist beaten, bought, or cowed into silence in one of the hot spots of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Latin America. Many, at the border between courage and self-destruction, understandably find the cost of crossing too high. If journalistic freedom has expanded since the end of the Cold War, the trend is endangered by even the mild economic downturn and political turbulence since the book went to press. Collings’s own illustrations suggest that nationalism, civil war, and ethnic strife will take as great a toll on journalists as did the Cold War. The cases he presents inspire more fear than hope. His work reminds jaded Western journalists that more is at stake in delivering the news than scoops about Rudy Giuliani’s mistress troubles. It reminds all of us that in most of the world freedom of the press remains a principle under siege. Alexander C. Kafka is an editor at the Chronicle Review magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education.