It’s been over a week since Peter R. de Vries, the Netherlands’ celebrated crime reporter, was gunned down on the streets of Amsterdam, leaving him fighting for his life.
In another violent case in February, Christian Lantenois, a photojournalist for the French L’Union regional paper, was almost beaten to death in Reims’ dodgy Croix-Rouge neighborhood (a district that, by the way, the French press often refers to as “sensitive territory”). After hanging on to life by a thread for several days and enduring a month in a medically induced coma, Mr. Lantenois talked about the incident for the first time in a radio interview yesterday morning.
During the interview, the photojournalist said that “the fact that a journalist is attacked while doing his job is unacceptable,” adding that he believes this case “puts press freedom to the test.”
I couldn’t agree more.
While we can now see clearly that, sadly, journalists in Western Europe no longer feel as safe as they did in the past, internationally acclaimed “objective-independent” organizations seem to turn a blind eye to these recent threats to press freedom.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), for example, one of George Soros’s favorite watchdogs, lists the Netherlands 6th and France 34th on their World Press Freedom 2021 ranking. Meanwhile, Hungary, a country where no journalist has to put their life in jeopardy, ranks 92nd. Yes, ninety-second. That’s somewhere between Haiti and Guinea-Bissau.
They can’t be serious.
Adding insult to injury, in a report published last week, Soros-affiliated RSF included Prime Minister Orbán among 37 heads of state and government in a list of “press freedom predators.” Needless to say, the irony here is rich.