'The World Is Not a Bad Place': remembering U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

The murder of a journalist, even in a time of war, can never be described as "collateral damage," especially when the journalist is a powerful communicator such as Daniel Pearl. Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted Jan. 23 in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi. Videotape released by his captors four weeks later suggests that he was brutally executed by Muslim terrorists.

As a professional, Pearl is best remembered for his coverage of people and events in Asia and the Middle East. He was a keen writer with no agenda except to expose readers to the soft underbelly of globalization. Reporters are trained to focus on the "who, what, when, where and why," but Pearl represented the "yes, but..." school of communication. He looked for the quirky angle, questioned accepted wisdom and always seemed to bring out the nuanced realities of the events or people he wrote about.

So why would terrorists want to take the life of a journalist likely to give them a voice? International conflict--the flip side of globalization--has put journalists in a peculiar light where they're often seen as cultural representatives or political interference. Pearl's captors accused him spying for the CIA. And last year, a photojournalist for the French news agency, AFP, on assignment in Beijing, was beaten and dragged through the streets by police because he was photographing a demonstrator who was protesting the 2008 Olympics.

These examples raise an interesting question: Do some cultures or governments consider the journalist more disruptive than the protester? Journalists are just the conveyors of information that connects and divides the world, yet they are mistakenly treated as if they shape foreign policy. If they influence public opinion, it is because they provide us with an extra pair of eyes or act as filters that make sense of people we are not familiar with and events we are not privy to.

As communicators, journalists know they wield an uncanny power, one that can put them in the line of danger. Last September, a British reporter was arrested by the Taliban and accused of spying. More recently in Afghanistan, a Canadian newspaper reporter was seriously wounded when a hand grenade was thrown into her car. The person (or persons) who mailed anthrax to media outlets took leading journalists head on. In a twisted logic, those who want to broadcast their agenda believe they can do it by attacking those who deliver the news. But history has shown us that "killing the messenger" never expunges the message.

Several centuries of religious and secular censorship preceded the recent attacks on journalists, so it's not just the modern media that incense terrorist organizations. Nor is it just words that people fear. Syndicated cartoonists get death threats, too. Why? Because they also traffic in ideas. "Terrorism against the idea" is the new form of terrorism, wrote Abbie Hoffman in London's newspaper The Independent. He was writing in 1981 about Salman Rushdie, but he could have very well been referring to Pearl.

Pearl demonstrated his belief that people are inherently good, irrespective of their circumstances or ideology, when he wrote a song, "The World Is Not a Bad Place," for the birth of a friend's son. Surely he recognized the irony, as he worked in what most of us would label a "bad place" but found and wrote of great humanity there. It is a lesson for communicators, who often brand people and events, to continue to look for "good places," because they do exist. That will be our greatest tribute to Pearl.

Angelo Fernando is a freelance writer in Tempe, Ariz. and a member of ABC's Phoenix chapter. He can be reached at [e-mail].