I WORE my commemorative black ribbon on Wednesday. More than a few people unfamiliar with the symbol inquired as to why I was wearing it.

I said it was to remember fallen colleagues, journalists killed in the line of work on this World Press Freedom Day, May 3. I told them about Andy Skrzypkowiak, an ITN cameraman who had talked kindly to me as a rookie reporter on one of my first war assignments during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the early 1980s. Andy was such a support to me at that time, but just a few months later fighters loyal to Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar captured and murdered him by crushing his skull with a rock while he slept.

I also told those who asked, of other friends and colleagues. People like Swedish correspondent Martin Adler, whom I worked alongside during the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti, and in Somalia. It was in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, while covering an Islamist rally, that Martin was shot dead at point-blank range by an unknown gunman.

This week I remembered fondly too, the late, great Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, one of the finest war correspondents of her generation. It seems like an age ago now, but in 2012 Marie was killed by shellfire in the besieged Syrian city of Homs alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik.

Marie was fearless in the pursuit of what she called finding truths in a “sandstorm of propaganda”. In 2001 after coming under fire in Sri Lanka, she lost her left eye. Once recovered, she chose to return to the world’s frontlines wearing a distinctive black eye patch that made her even more instantly recognisable and adding to her already buccaneering character.

I recall a certain enforced candlelit dinner I had with Marie during the Lebanon conflict of 2006, in a little fish restaurant in the coastal town of Tyre. Miraculously the place had remained open despite the bombardment by Israeli forces that had left buildings nearby still smouldering and blacked out the town’s electricity supply. “This makes you about as blind as I am,” quipped Marie in her usual dry, self-deprecating American way from across the table through the flickering darkness.

In the hands of Marie Colvin, Andy Skrzypkowiak, Martin Adler and others like them, the reporter’s trade is something to be proud of. Across the world journalists like them shine a spotlight on, and give a voice to, people who have no voice. They bring to our attention the civilians caught in the crossfire of conflict, the refugees and migrants uprooted and adrift like flotsam, the poorest and most vulnerable, crushed underfoot by uncaring authority and governments.

Those who document and cover such people and happenings epitomise the reporter’s real value. I’m talking here about journalism’s greatest capacity, that of helping prevent abuses of power or exposing immoral, unethical or illegal behaviour by individuals, armies, governments or companies.

These are the values World Press Freedom Day stands for, and rarely can there have been a more pressing time to recognise and embrace those values than right now. It’s theme this year of Critical Minds for Critical Times: Media’s Role in Advancing Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, says it all.

Right now we live in a time when a cacophony of voices shout “fake news”. A time, too, when public trust in the media is at an all-time low and world leaders, even in democracies, make the independent media’s job even more difficult.

It’s easy for some to make light of journalists being banned from watching Prime Minister Theresa May walking around a factory during an election campaign visit. But small and insignificant as it might seem, therein lies a slippery slope. Just ask many people in Turkey.

When the US President tweets that journalists are the “enemy of the people”, then we have a measure of how just easy it is for an independent press to come under threat in free societies.

Yes, I’ll admit that some within my industry have been their own worst enemy when it comes to winning over public confidence in the job they do. So many of those who criticise the press, however, lose sight of the fact that not all reporters are prepared to ride roughshod over the people whose stories they cover, or indeed that journalism itself can be an extremely positive tool in the right hands.

In 2017, World Press Freedom Day has taken on a new importance. According to Freedom House a human rights organisation based in Washington DC, freedom of the press globally declined to its lowest point in 13 years. Add to this the findings of the Committee to Protect Journalists, that 259 journalists across the world were in jail in 2016, a record high since the watchdog organisation started keeping track in 1990, and the picture is worrying.

Some countries remain dangerous places to be a local journalist. In Turkey since the failed coup attempt in 2016, at least 156 media outlets have been shut down and an estimated 2,500 journalists and other media workers have lost their jobs. Journalists have been arrested and charged with terrorism offences as a result of posts they have shared on Twitter, cartoons they have drawn or opinions they expressed. This is taking place within the context of a wider crackdown against perceived government critics.

Then there is Mexico, a country ravaged by a militarised war on drugs, and where reporting that violence is in itself deadly. With five journalists killed since the beginning of the year, 2017 is already on track to surpass last year’s death toll of 11 reporters killed.

Speaking at an address a few years ago to remember those journalists who gave their lives to report from the conflict zones of the 21st century, Marie Colvin described her job as “a hard calling”.

Right now, across the world these are the worst of times and the best of times if you happen to be a journalist.

They are the worst because of rising intimidation, restrictions and the threat of ‘fake news’. They are the best because we are living through tumultuous world events that more than ever need the likes of reporters like my late friends and colleagues Marie Colvin, Andy Skrzypkowiak, Martin Adler and others to bear witness and make sense of those events on our behalf. In this, the week that saw World Press Freedom Day take on ever more urgent significance, I remember and salute them all.