There was a time when identifying yourself a journalist covering a conflict would increase your safety. Today, it’s more like putting a target on your back. The executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists talked to PBS Newshour about the paradox: “We live in an age defined by information. And yet the people who bring us this information are dying, being imprisoned, being killed in record numbers. If you look at the data, it is shocking, but press freedom, freedom of expression is actually in decline around the world.” Any attack on the press is also an attack on those who consume its output. The way I see it, there are 4 types of people who should be especially disgusted by recent events: Journalists, artists, comedians, and everyone.

+ “The killers proved the cartoonists’ point with ghastly finality: theirs was a necessary, freedom-sustaining, and therefore life-giving, form of defiance. Without it, they knew, we– humankind — are less.” The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch with a short, powerful piece: The Pen vs. the Gun.

+ WaPo: News organizations wrestle with whether to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons after attack.

+ George Packer: “The murders in Paris were so specific and so brazen as to make their meaning quite clear. The cartoonists died for an idea … So we must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day.”