It’s been a dark couple of days for journalism. On Tuesday, a New Hampshire native, photojournalist James Foley, was killed by ISIS militants in response to U.S. bombings in Iraq. A second journalist, also from New Hampshire, Steven Sotloff, has been threatened with beheading, too.

Although it doesn’t get a lot of attention until something like this happens, journalists, especially in war zones, are in more dangerous situation in some ways than soldiers. There is very little in the way of international law that protects journalists, as opposed to civilians of any other sort. They aren’t treated as combatants, and don’t enjoy specific Geneva convention protections.

While the deliberate murder of civilians is a war crime under international law, it is almost never one that is punished unless the crimes rise to the level of genocide.

Journalists have been shot and killed, female journalists have been raped, and journalists are routinely threatened while merely covering the news.

While covering the shelling of Gaza, a CNN correspondent was threatened by people who had gathered on the hillside to watch the shelling, and was intimidated as she gave her report on air. She was subsequently transferred to Moscow after the residents complained to her network about a tweet she released after being threatened by the crowd. An NBC reporter who had been covering Gaza from within when children were killed on the beach by Israeli gunfire was withdrawn from the region. Israeli bombs specifically targeted television stations and radio stations, and struck the home of a journalist in Gaza, killing him and his family. Israel tried to claim that Hamas was threatening the press so they did not report on “human shields” in Gaza, but the foreign press almost universally denied this.

Journalists are assassinated by criminal elements who don’t want their activities reported in the news, as occurred in Mexico during the drug gang warfare.

And journalists are arrested and held without trial.

Journalism is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, with more than 1,000 reporters killed since 1992, 88 of them just in the last year. More than 200 journalists are imprisoned around the world.

They don’t have to be in faraway conflicts overseas to run into problems. Journalists were arrested in Ferguson, Missouri as they covered the unrest there over the last couple of weeks, and were threatened with deadly violence by the police.

What’s more, the police didn’t seem to care that cameras were rolling, and that every cell phone was trained on them.

The killing or mistreatment of U.S. journalists is also a war crime under U.S. law, triggering the application of our domestic war crimes statute. But none of the Ferguson police who were engaged in deliberate threatening of the clearly defined press were arrested, nor are they likely to face any charges. One has been suspended without pay “indefinitely” and the county police department issued a statement condemning the officer’s behavior.

Instead, what we are hearing is that “anyone within a riot zone” is going to be treated exactly the same, whether that person is throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails or whether he or she is holding a camera or a pen and notebook.

The presence of journalists normally means that police have to be on their best behavior. Journalists occupy a strange netherworld, where they are in the thick of the action, but not a part of it. It’s a dangerous place to be, and things happen.

But in the U.S., journalism is the only profession that is specifically protected by the Constitution. They are there because you, the reading public, have the right to know what is happening in Syria and Gaza, Los Angeles and Ferguson.

Their focus should be on getting the story right, not getting out alive.