ABSTRACT
The ultimate constraint on journalists is said to be imposed through murder. The killing of Veronica Guerin, crime reporter of the Sunday Independent, in Dublin on 26 June 1996, highlighted starkly the dangers posed to intrepid investigative journalists. Yet her reporting style and death (the subject of a 2003 Hollywood blockbuster starring Cate Blanchett) raised serious questions about journalists’ training for dangerous assignments and newspapers’ cultivation of their star reporters’ personalities as a deliberate marketing ploy. In her biography of Guerin, Emily O’Reilly (1998) quotes Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post: ‘Although it has become increasingly difficult for this newspaper and for the press generally to do since Watergate, reporters should make every effort to remain in the audience, to stay off the stage, to report history, not to make history.’ According to O’Reilly, the Sunday Independent broke the Bradlee rule – and Guerin paid a terrible price.
