Journalism is a fascinating profession. Those of us who practice it feel truly privileged. We have a front-row seat to history-making events. While reporting on them can be enthralling, it also requires a great deal of bravery, and oftentimes the search for the truth can put you on a collision course with the powers that be.

That is the case for a group of women I met last week when they received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. Every year, three women from around the world are honored for the valor they exhibit in the exercise of the profession, and one is granted a Lifetime Achievement Award.

I read about this year's honorees before meeting them at the awards banquet, and was moved by their stories. But listening to them speak as they accepted their awards brought a sense of crude reality to the torments they've had to endure.

Iryna Khalip has been a journalist for more than 15 years in the former Soviet Republic of Belarus. She worked at several newspapers that have been shut down by the government, but continues to denounce the excesses of the dictatorship. “When was it that we began to lose our freedom?” she asked in her speech. “Was it when my colleagues started to get arrested for reporting the news, or when the police searched my house after I published a piece on corruption, or when my friends started to disappear one by one?” Dictatorships don't like journalists, she rightly claimed. They either destroy them or buy them out. Because of her incisive reporting, Khalip has been arrested, subjected to all-night interrogations and beaten by police, yet she says she will never be silenced. “If all media venues are shut down to me, I shall shout the news to you,” she says. “Please listen.”

Agnes Taile is a beautiful and witty young African woman. At only 29 years old, she displays a knowledge and determination beyond her years. Denouncing government corruption and reporting on the injustices women in Cameroon have to tolerate has become her life's mission. She accepted the award in the name of those young girls who are “forced to give up their quest for knowledge, who suffer discrimination, prostitution and forced marriages.”

“I think of all those women who will never see their children again because they have been kidnapped and had their throats slashed or have been burned alive for an unpaid ransom,” she said. It was the injustices she's personally experienced in her life that compelled her to become “society's watchdog.” Taile not only lost her job in television and radio, but almost lost her life after being abducted from her home at knifepoint by hooded men, then beaten and left for dead. “I have lost my job, but my conviction is stronger today than ever before.”

Jila Baniyaghoob defends women's rights in a country where women have few rights. She could not be present to receive her award. She recently was released from an Iranian jail, where she was held as punishment for her coverage of the government crackdown on protesters after the last presidential election. Her husband, also a journalist, is still behind bars.

Amira Hass says she doesn't understand why she would receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, when her work represents only a third of her lifetime. Besides, she claims, as a journalist she has failed. For the past 20 years she has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian issues with a unique perspective. As the only Israeli Jew living under Palestinian rule, she often denounces what she considers the unfair and immoral restrictions that Palestinians are subjected to by her government. “My sources are not secret documents and leaked-out minutes which were taken at meetings of people in power and with power,” she says. “My sources are the open ways by which the subjugated are being dispossessed of their equal rights as human beings.”

“Thousands of my articles and zillions of words have evaporated. They could not compete with the official language that has been happily adopted by the mass media, and is used in order to dis-portray the reality. Indeed, a remarkable failure of a journalist,” she ended.

These women's stories should not go untold, and their clamor for justice should not be ignored. Every society has its problems and its fair share of injustice and inequality. But in our country, we too often take for granted how fortunate we are as journalists to have the freedom to speak out against them without putting our lives at risk.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2009 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate