Although three different organizations don’t quite agree on the numbers, they agree on the trends that journalists and support staff deaths and arrests around the world are increasing according to this BBC report.  Reporters without Borders:

For the third year, Iraq was the most dangerous country for the media, with more journalists killed there since 2003 than in the entire Vietnam war.

In 2005, 63 journalists and five media assistants were killed worldwide, Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) says.

More than 1,300 were attacked or threatened and over 800 were arrested.

“The only figure that has fallen in the past year is the number of journalists arrested (807 compared with 907 in 2004),” RSF commented.

“But this is not good enough, because every day an average of two journalists are arrested somewhere in the world just for trying to do their job.”

And 126 journalists and 70 “cyber-dissidents” were in jail around the world as the year ended, according to the Paris-based group’s records.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists:

“Forty-seven journalists were killed in 2005, more than three-quarters of whom were murdered to silence their criticism or punish them for their work,” the CPJ’s annual survey found.

“Kidnappers in Iraq, political assassins in Beirut and hit men in the Philippines made murder the leading cause of work-related deaths among journalists worldwide in 2005,” the organisation said.

The CPJ said its analysis had detected a long-term trend that “those who murder journalists usually go unpunished”.

International News Safety Institute:

48 journalists were killed in a plane crash outside Tehran in December.

“Elsewhere, around the globe, 98 journalists and critical support staff died on duty, a third of them in Iraq, the bloodiest conflict for the news media in modern times,” INSI said.

Like the CPJ, the INSI report noted that impunity for the killers of journalists was widely regarded as one of the underlying causes of the continuing unacceptably high death toll of media staff worldwide.

“In many countries the bullet or the bomb is a cheap and relatively risk-free way of silencing troublesome reporting,” INSI director Rodney Pinder said.