The murder of a journalist, even in a time of war, can never be dismissed by that awful military catchall “collateral damage,” especially a powerful communicator like Daniel Pearl. Pearl was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was abducted January 23rd in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi. Videotape evidence released by his captors four weeks later suggests he was brutally executed.

As a professional, he is best remembered for stories on Asia and the Middle East. He was a keen writer with no agenda except to expose readers to the soft underbelly of globalization. Reporters are trained to focus on the who-what-when-where-why, but Pearl represented the “yes, but...” school of communication.

He looked for the quirky angle, questioned accepted wisdom, and always seemed to bring out the nuanced realities of the people he wrote about.

So why would any terrorist organization want to take the life of a journalist who is their best chance of giving them a voice? International conflict –the flip side of globalization—has put journalists in a peculiar box. The journalist is often regarded as a cultural representative –or a political interference. Pearl’s captors accused him of spying for the CIA. And last year, a a photojournalist for the French news agency, AFP, on assignment in Beijing, was beaten and dragged through the streets by police because he was photographing a a demonstrator who was protesting the 2008 Olympics. These examples raise an interesting question: Do cultures and governments consider the journalist more “disruptive” than the protester? Journalists are the transmitters of super-charged information that connect and divide the world. They are mistakenly treated as those who shape foreign policy, when all they do is bounce the signals from source to recipient and back. If they shape public opinion, it is because they provide us with an extra pair of eyes, or act as filters that make sense of people we are not familiar with, or events we are not privy to. Reporters such as Pearl are also easy targets. They are genuine, trusting and idealistic.

Intimidating journalists isn’t a new phenomenon. As communicators, journalists know what they are up against. Last September, a British reporter was arrested by the Taliban and accused of spying. More recently in Afghanistan, a Canadian newspaper reporter was seriously wounded when a hand grenade was thrown into her car. The person (or persons) who mailed anthrax to the media took leading journalists head on. In a twisted logic, those who desperately need to broadcast their agenda believe they can do it by attacking the transmitter. But history has shown that “killing the messenger” never expunges the message.

Those who are in the business of communication know they wield an uncanny power. Several centuries of religious and secular censorship preceded the recent attack on individuals and the media. So it’s not just the modern media that is intimidating. Nor is it just words that people fear. Syndicated cartoonists get death threats too. Why? Because they too traffic in ideas. "Terrorism against the idea" is the new form of terrorism, wrote Abbie Hoffman in London's newspaper The Independent. He was writing in 1981 about Salman Rushdie, but he could have very well been referring to Pearl.

Pearl was the embodiment of the another idea, the idea that people were inherently good, and no different from us, irrespective of their circumstances or ideology. One of his friends recalls a song that Pearl wrote for his son a few days before he was born. Its title: "The world is not a bad place."

Pearl ought to have known the irony. He moved in and out of what most of us would label “bad places,”  but he found and wrote of great humanity inside. It is a lesson for us communicators, who often brand people and events, to continue to look for those “good places” because they do exist. That will be our greatest tribute to Pearl.

Angelo Fernando is a freelance writer in Tempe, Ariz. and member of the Phoenix chapter of IABC.