A week ago, Peter R. de Vries, a star journalist in the Netherlands, was leaving a studio where he’d just appeared as a guest on a TV program, RTL Boulevard, when a gunman shot him five times, including in the head. De Vries has covered the criminal underworld dating back to the eighties and nineties, when he tracked down a man who helped kidnap Freddy Heineken, the beer tycoon; recently, de Vries had been acting as a confidant and spokesperson for a gang informant in a high-profile case against an alleged high-level crime boss. On Saturday, RTL Boulevard canceled a planned broadcast and evacuated its studio, citing what it characterized as a serious threat from organized crime; police wouldn’t go into specifics, but a Dutch newspaper reported that they had learned of a possible attack by rocket launcher. (This would not have been unprecedented—in 2018, an anti-tank rocket was fired at the offices of a newspaper publisher.) De Vries is still fighting for his life. On its latest World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked the Netherlands sixth out of one hundred and eighty countries globally—making it, theoretically at least, one of the safest places in the world to practice journalism. The day after de Vries was shot in Amsterdam, three men attacked Erk Acarer, a Turkish journalist, at his home in Berlin, where he has lived in exile since 2017. Acarer, who writes for the independent Turkish newspaper BirGün and works for a broadcaster established by other... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-07-13 12:34:55 UTC ]