We will not be silenced

When I went to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a few months ago, one of the exhibits that struck me was the Journalists Memorial—a two-story, glass panel tribute etched with the names of reporters, photographers and broadcasters from around the world who've died reporting the news.

I remember taking the picture you see above of a spiral notebook exactly like the one I toss about every day, stained with the blood of a foreign correspondent, and feeling awed.

Last week I read a piece by The Associated Press on journalists covering the drug trade in Mexico becoming targets, killed for doing their job. Like 40-year-old Armando Rodríguez, crime reporter at El Diario newspaper, shot 10 times last month while his 8-year-old daughter watched. The Washington Post ran a story on his murder.

In the past month or so, I've been chugging through CBS correspondent Kim Dozier's book, Breathing the Fire, on surviving a Baghdad bombing. I thought it might help me deal with my own PTSD from the 2006 rollover; it only made me feel whiny about the residual emotional trauma.

But her book did hammer home, once again, how dangerous being a reporter can be. In war zones. In insular beach towns where simply having your byline out there opens you up to public criticism—or worse.

I told someone today that when I took this job, I learned to accept that not everyone would like my coverage or support my investigative pursuits. I learned to deal with mum officials, critical e-mails and phone calls, and sources hanging up in my face.

But one thing, I said, that I didn't sign up for was living in, if not fear, caution, because of the colour of my skin. I realized today how very real racial threats of violence are. It's a strange and disheartening thing to deal with having grown up in Trinidad.

And it's not something I think I'll ever accept or take lying down if it ever happens to me. There's a reason they say not to pick a fight with someone with the power of the pen. Silence one journalist; start a very public cause.

You. Will. Lose.