The murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan last Thursday conjured up a memory for me. As a teenager growing up in the Arab world in the late 1950s, I recall how, when people wanted to discredit an idea you shared with them, they would invariably say, somewhat dismissively: “Come now, that’s newspaper talk.”

The reason for that is obvious. People in Third World countries, including Arab countries at the time, have traditionally looked upon their press as a “mobilizing media” whose goal is the promotion of the views of whatever regime happened to be in power, not as an independent source of information and commentary.

Consider how in interviews, some political leaders in these countries extrapolate from their social reality by addressing American journalists in the second person plural, as in, let’s say, “Your policies are not evenhanded,” or “You are wrong to consider attacking Iraq.” The implication here is that a journalist’s job is to advance or defend his government’s agenda, and thus he is rightfully held accountable for its shortcomings.

Humbug! In the US, the role of the media is in fact the opposite. Reporters are watchdogs over, not lapdogs in the service of, their government.

They are there to inform the public “without fear or favor,” and to expose government malfeasance and abuse of the law by its officials. Where that malfeasance and abuse exist, as they did in Watergate in the early 1970s and the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors in the mid 1980s, or in the military’s obfuscations in Vietnam in 1968 and the CIA’s machinations in Chile in 1973, reporters are out there scrambling, indeed competing with each other, to tell the truth — to tell the truth as objectively as possible, with editors and fact checkers in the meanwhile looking over these reporters’ shoulders to insure that whatever they present their readers falls within the professional guidelines of one’s calling as a journalist.

Indeed, the media’s commitment to inform the public, and to stand up to that public’s right to be told the truth up front, has extended to its challenging the government in a court of law, as happened in 1974 when the New York Times and the Washington post went all the way to the Supreme Court to have it adjudicate on whether or not the American people were entitled to be told what was contained in the Pentagon Papers, up till then a classified document.

That the media won the court case attests not only to its independence from government, but also to the adversarial role it insists on playing vis-a-vis established authority.

A reporter, in short, is not an advocate, but a professional who is writing, as journalism has been defined, “the rough draft of history.” This is why the murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan last Thursday, after well over a month in captivity, is all the more gruesome.

I don’t know what cause the abductors espoused. In several missives they sent to news agencies, replete with missing punctuation marks, aberrant spelling and other oddities, they appeared to make demands on behalf of the Pakistani prisoners at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to express their protests against the union between their government and the United States in the war on terrorism.

If that was their cause, their luring a journalist into a trap, kidnapping him and then snuffing out his life, is a perverted, not to mention a ghoulish, way of going about advancing that cause.

Though he was not born there, Pearl, 38, was effectively a Washingtonian who worked in the American capital for several years, where, after hours, he often jammed - he was reputedly competent at handling a violin, guitar and mandolin - with a bluegrass band at a club called Madam’s Organ.

The club is on 18th Street, NW, which is in the heart of Adams Morgan, the hip, ethnically mixed neighborhood north of Dupont Circle. Two blocks down is Angles, my own watering hole, an establishment patronized predominantly by writers, journalists, musicians and other lost souls, many of whom had personally known Daniel and talked of him fondly when news of his murder was broadcast that night.

Ironically, just as Daniel Pearl was being honored that night, another journalist was being dishonored. And that was Michael Finkel, who got fired by the New York Times that very same day when a 6,000-word article he had written for the paper’s Sunday magazine section back in November, titled “Is Youssouf Male a Slave,” which described the experience of an adolescent West African boy in Mali, was exposed as being deceptive, since the boy was actually a composite.

Times’ editor Howell Raines, writing in an unusually long “Editor’s Note,” saw it as “a very serious matter.” Finkel was summarily fired, though, in its typically restrained fashion, the Times’ note merely said: “Finkel has been under contract to the magazine as a contributing writer, but the editors have informed him that he will not receive further assignments.”

Michael Finkel’s chances of reintegrating himself into journalism are now as mockingly remote as those of Janet Cook, who was fired by the Washington Post in April, 1981, for writing another one of those composites — a no-no in the profession — about an alleged 8-year old heroin addict in Southeast Washington.

And who said that American reporters are not held to high standards, or that their feet are not held to the fire by their editors when they wander off from the objective world they had sworn to report on “without fear or favor”? Who said they are necessarily advocates of their government and are to be held responsible for its policies by paying with their lives?

Down the street from where I live in Arlington, Virginia, in suburban Washington, is the Newseum. Outside this domed building stands the Journalists Memorial. Bolted onto it are starphire glass panels on which the names, places and dates of death of journalists who died on assignment are engraved. When the memorial was built in 1996, there were 77 panels left blank. This year it is expected that all panels will be filled.

The death of journalists — whose job has been likened to firefighters who rush toward danger — by accident is especially tragic; but when they are deliberately targeted for wanton murder by crazies out there because of guilt attributed to them by association, or because they are exposing corruption, or because they are ferreting out facts about a story that these crazies do no want revealed, it is decidedly egregious.

I did not know Daniel Pearl, but I grieve his death nevertheless. Another voice that had given readers a window on the objective realities of our world and that had made its own contribution to writing “the rough draft of history” has been silenced.

Rest in peace, Dan.