WHEN NEWSPAPERS draw particular attention to attacks against journalists, it is not special pleading. No one argues that journalists as people are more privileged than anyone else, or that threatening or kidnapping or imprisoning or killing a journalist in itself carries some distinct level of horror. Thousands of people, unfortunately, are abused worldwide, all the time. Why should journalists be any different?

No, the point is this: An attack on a journalist is an attack on information. It is an attempt to silence someone who knows the wrong things. It is a means to control the public's understanding of reality. It is an assault on openness -- and in that sense it is an assault on the public itself.

Yes, journalists sometimes put themselves in harm's way, and anyone in the same line of work would want to express solidarity. But the point has more to do with the motive, and the consequence, than with the act itself.

This year, as it does every year, the Committee to Protect Journalists has given out its International Press Freedom Awards. Four recipients, from around the world, were honored at a fund-raising dinner in New York last week. What's striking is the ordinariness of the four; none is a cowboy or a hot dog.

Consider Irina Petrushova of Kazakhstan, editor of Respublika. A business newspaper in a country where business is marked by official favoritism, nepotism, corruption and Swiss bank accounts is a newspaper asking for trouble, and Ms. Petrushova got it in spades. A funeral wreath with her name on it was delivered to her. A decapitated dog was left hanging from a window grating at the paper; the dog's head turned up at her house. Then the paper's offices were firebombed and destroyed.

In September, the diminutive 36-year-old fled to Moscow, where she continues to edit her newspaper from afar.

"Like hundreds of my colleagues in other countries around the world, I fear for myself and my sons," she told the gathering in New York. But -- "I am even more afraid that my children will have to live in a totally corrupt society. I fear they will have to lie, to offer bribes, to grovel."

Or consider Ignacio Gomez, who continues to write fearlessly about drugs and politics in Colombia despite the deaths and abductions of colleagues and threats against himself. Or Tipu Sultan, who wrote a wire-service story implicating a Bangladeshi politician in an arson attack on a school, and was shortly after beaten nearly to death by the politician's private thugs.

One recipient couldn't make the dinner: Fesshaye Yohannes of Eritrea has been in prison since the independent press was banned there more than a year ago. He has been unheard from since May.

There was another journalist in New York last week, Mariane Pearl. Her husband, Daniel, was murdered this year in Pakistan while working for The Wall Street Journal. That was a case that many Americans, in and out of journalism, found deeply disturbing -- yet, sadly, it was not that unusual. Last year, 37 journalists were killed worldwide.

And even as the tables were being set for the CPJ dinner, Islamic leaders in Nigeria were urging Muslims to kill Isioma Daniel, a reporter for This Day who wrote about the aborted Miss World contest there.

Acts of violence against the press, as attacks on the free flow of information that is the lifeblood of democracy, unfortunately anchor one end -- granted, the most extreme end -- of a spectrum that reaches into all countries.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia vetoes a bill that would allow him to crack down hard on the press; but he already has the ability to crack down soft, and that is sufficient. In the past year, even a democracy like the United States has imposed wider and wider restrictions on the public's right to know.

This is not what Irina Petrushova would recognize as an assault on the press of the type she is familiar with. But the motive is the same, and that's what's wrong with it.