Saudi Arabia Can’t Escape Khashoggi’s Shadow - Bloomberg

Saudi Arabia Can’t Escape Khashoggi’s Shadow - Bloomberg:

Last October, a few days after the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, I found myself in the thicket of TV cameras outside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Standing a few dozen feet from the scene of the crime, I marveled at the international attention being devoted to the killing of a member of my professional tribe—and wondered how long this interest would last.

A few weeks, I guessed, maybe a couple of months; my professional cynicism doesn’t allow for much optimism.

For journalists, murder is an occupational hazard. In the year of Khashoggi’s murder alone, 53 journalists were killed, at least 34 of them as a direct consequence of their work. Only a handful of those murders made the international headlines — the four Capital Gazette journalists shot dead by a gunman in Annapolis, Raed Fares of Radio Fresh, assassinated by the regime in Syria — and even then, just for a few days. I reckoned the Khashoggi killing would fade from the collective memory in the same way.