BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC)  — While no Caribbean journalists have been killed in the line of duty so far this year, the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) marked World Press Freedom Day today by highlighting a range of factors that it said continue to muzzle the region’s news media.

“Though we have generally escaped the worst impacts of impunity, violence and official aggression, Caribbean social communicators and journalists have not eluded the potentially muting impacts of self-censorship, unenlightened regulation and challenging economic, social and political circumstances,” said Wesley Gibbings, ACM president in a statement.

But elsewhere, press rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned a particularly violent start to 2012 for the world’s journalists.

For the first four months of the year, 21 journalists and six bloggers and citizen reporters have been killed, many of them in Somalia, Syria and other war zones.

This represents a death rate of “one news provider killed every five days”.

The ACM, the umbrella of national media associations in the Caribbean, also called on its national affiliates to strengthen the media industry, push for media law reform and operate as “fearlessly independent agents of awareness and the change it brings”.

“Those organisations that are in crisis must be rescued and those that are asleep must awaken. This is a sacred responsibility we ignore at our peril.”

The ACM said the theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day – ‘New Voices: Media Freedom Helping to Transform Societies’ also reflected what the Caribbean needed for development and change.

“As relatively new nations, Caribbean societies have also, in many respects, been the new hemispheric voices of the past 50 years. We are now called upon to be more aware of the new voices within our midst.”