Because they fear the truth

Vigil for Lasantha after his assassination After a year in Sri Lanka there is still not a culprit for the death of Lasantha Wickrematunge, the director of The Sunday Leader killed by four gunmen as he drove his car to the newspaper. Before he died, he wrote an editorial in which he accused the Sri Lankan government for his death. It's just one of the many journalists in the world who have been killed and maybe will never have justice.

Happens when the killers should be sought within governments or inside the powerful organized crime cartels, and nobody wants to do so. Sri Lanka is in fact one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. The government has defeated this year after decades of civil war, the Tamil Tigers, but has attracted international criticism for the treatment of the Tamil minority living in the north, that for months after the war has been locked in prison camps . Now in Sri Lanka elections are close, and against President Rajapaksa, considered the responsible for the poor state of human rights in the country, stands General Sarath Fonseka, who won the war but promised autonomy to the Tamil and accused the government to have decided, without consulting him, arbitrary executions of suspected rebels. A polical change could therefore improve the situation in the country. The fault of Lasantha and many other journalists arrested, threatened and killed in Sri Lanka had been to inform the public about the lack of respect for law and human rights in the country.
It's always this the fault of journalists who are persecuted and killed, as in Iran, where the government now threatens to impose death penalty on opponents and the country has become the world's biggest prison for journalists, with 42 people detained for daring to write the truth in newspapers or on the Internet. Follows, but very close, China, where it is sufficient to create a video that speaks about Tibet to receive six years in prison. The situation of press freedom is very bad in many other countries, like Pakistan, where journalists suffer attacks from two different fronts, intimidated and arrested by the government and killed by Islamic fundamentalists.
Or Mexico, where, in 2009 only, 13 journalists were killed, usually local reporters investigating corruption or organized crime, and another 17, for the same reasons, in the rest of Latin America. A very similar situation to that of our southern Italy, where nevertheless from 1993 onwards our mafia, so far, against journalist used only major threats. This does not mean that we can enjoy the state of press freedom in Italy, as besides the mafias we also have a majority in the government which often attacks our freedom of expression, already severely limited.
Losing press freedom is easy, as seen in Russia, where many journalists were killed in the indifference of the majority of the citizens, or in many African nations where the tyrant in office, perhaps with the backing of large Western companies, wants to silence inconvenient voices. Press freedom is lost when there are dirty interests who are afraid of the truth, because they are unwilling to reveal their corruption and their abuse, but above all it is lost if people do not do anything to defend it. Because too many people forget very easily what the corrupt governments and criminal organizations never forget: that without truth there is not justice, nor democracy, nor hope.