Back-to-back display killings of journalists unprecedented

The apparent back-to-back murders of two American freelance journalists by the same group are unprecedented in CPJ’s history. The beheadings on camera in a two-week period of first James Foley and then Steven Sotloff appear to be an acceleration of a pattern–dating at least to Daniel Pearl’s killing in 2002–of criminal and insurgent groups displaying the murders of journalists to send a broad message of terror.

Despite heartfelt pleas from their families including each reporter’s mother, Islamic State militants operating in Syria and northern Iraq beheaded first Foley, in a video released August 19, and then apparently Sotloff in a video released today, as a grisly way of telegraphing the group’s strength and influence to the world. As of late today, U.S. officials had not confirmed the Sotloff video’s authenticity.

With the rise of mobile Internet technology and social media in recent years, nonstate actors like Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram have tried to leverage platforms like Twitter and YouTube for themselves, bypassing traditional media to disseminate their messages directly, as CPJ documented in a 2013 essay in Attacks on the Press. As both insurgent groups and the governments they fight have become more sensitive to how they are portrayed, CPJ found, journalists have been squeezed between threat of violent attack from one side and pressure of censorship or prosecution from the other.

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