By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, June 2011
In early June 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists released its annual Impunity Index — the documented ranking of countries with the most unsolved murders of journalists. Iraq led with 92 unsolved cases; Mexico, the 8th-most-dangerous country, had 13 unsolved murders in the index. CPJ had been publishing the list since 2008. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Matthew Fleischer, picked up the index as a substantive press-freedom reference document.
Then
The Committee to Protect Journalists had been one of the most-cited American press-freedom NGOs since its founding in 1981. The Impunity Index — launched in 2008 — had been the organization’s annual systematic documentation of unsolved journalist murders by country. The methodology counted journalist murders for which no convictions had been obtained within the prior decade; the index was structurally a measure of legal accountability for violence against journalists rather than a raw count of violence.
The 2011 index’s Iraq positioning (92 unsolved murders) reflected the substantial post-2003-invasion violence against Iraqi-and-foreign journalists across the post-war years. Mexico’s 8th-place ranking (13 unsolved murders) reflected the accelerating drug-cartel-related violence against Mexican journalists that had been building since the 2006 Calderón-administration drug-war initiation. The original FishbowlLA framing flagged the Mexico positioning explicitly because of how dramatically the country’s press-freedom-violence trajectory had been deteriorating.
CPJ’s broader methodology framework had built up substantial institutional credibility across multiple subsequent indexing cycles. The annual reports had been substantially picked up by international-press-freedom journalism, foreign-policy academic work, and ongoing diplomatic-and-NGO advocacy work. The 2011 release was part of an established annual cadence.
Matthew Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing was substantive. The piece treated the index as press-freedom documentation worth knowing about — connecting the international-press-freedom-violence question to the broader American-press-freedom conversation that FBLA covered through the LA-media-industry lens.
Now
The CPJ Impunity Index has continued as an annual publication across every subsequent year. The methodology has been refined over time; the broader institutional framework has held up as one of the most-cited measures of journalist-murder accountability globally.
The Mexico positioning that the 2011 piece flagged has dramatically deteriorated across the years since. Mexico has consistently ranked among the most dangerous countries for journalists across the post-2011 cycle; by the mid-2020s, Mexico had multiple years in which it was the deadliest country in the world for journalists. The cumulative pattern of Mexican-journalist murders related to cartel violence, government-and-police complicity, and broader institutional impunity has continued to be one of the most-cited international press-freedom crises.
Iraq’s positioning has substantially stabilized as the post-2003 immediate-war-period violence has receded. Other countries — Syria across the post-2011 civil war, the Philippines under Duterte, Pakistan, Russia, and various others — have produced substantial subsequent attention in the index cycle.
CPJ itself has continued as one of the major American press-freedom NGOs. The organization’s broader advocacy work has continued through multiple subsequent leadership cycles; the institutional credibility built up across the 2008-and-after annual reports has continued to be one of the foundations of contemporary international press-freedom journalism.
The 2011 piece reads now as one of the documented early-decade snapshots of the Impunity Index reporting framework — captured at a moment when the broader trajectory of Mexican-press-freedom violence was beginning to manifest in the data and before the subsequent decade of substantially worse press-freedom outcomes had materialized.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.