Via Rymenhild: a Sri Lankan editor and journalist was murdered last week. According to Time magazine, for whom Lasantha Wickrematunge was a correspondent:

A staffer [at Wickrematunge's newspaper] who was waiting at the hospital during his surgery told me a group of her colleagues had decided to go back to the office before they knew whether their mentor and friend would survive. "We have to get the newspaper out," she said. I can't think of a more fitting tribute.

Wickrematunge had been aware he might be killed, and left behind a last message to his readers. I type this with my eyes burning:

...If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

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This morning, my Talking Library shift included reading aloud a letter from a Sherry Bellenfant to the Tennessean that began, "Surely, I didn't waste my time reading yet another article on 'Joe the Plumber'" and continued, "I cannot believe with everything that's going on in our country that you are giving him space on your printed page. Find something interesting to write about with some substance to it."

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The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that "over the last 15 years, about 500 journalists have been murdered in direct relation to their work," and that "the majority of the 13 countries on CPJ's Impunity Index are established, peacetime democracies such as Mexico, pointing to alarming failures by those elected governments to protect journalists."

[CPJ strives to assist journalists in danger and to publicize attempts to silence them.]

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Today's subject line is from John Milton's "Areopagitica," a text I first encountered in someone else's denunciation of censorship ("Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so"), and which is quoted in the hymnal used by many Unitarian Universalist congregations ("Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making...").