It’s been almost a year of protests and crackdowns and all manner of violence in Syria. We can’t even know for sure how many people have been killed, but we believe it’s at least 6,000. It could easily be more, we don’t know for sure as the regime does not tolerate independent reporting. And how many more wounded – men, women, children… babies. So much blood, so much violence, so much pain – and for what? So one dictator can remain in power? It seems so irredeemably stupid.

Among the dead, two Western journalists killed in Homs yesterday after the building they were in was shelled by government forces. A young French photojournalist, Remi Ochlik, and a veteran US-born war reporter, Marie Colvin. They were among the very small number of independent journalists in Syria – as you might expect, the dictatorship that’s busy slaughtering its own civilian population isn’t keen on reporters chronicling the bloodshed to Western audiences.

As British PM David Cameron said in Parliament yesterday, the death of those journalists is a “desperately sad reminder of the risks that journalists take to inform the world of what is happening and the dreadful events in Syria”.

Yes, some journalists take real risks. I’m not among those people – about the biggest risk I face in my job is having the air conditioning conk out in the studio and sweating a little more than I like under those lights. Oh sure, I get nasty emails sometimes. But it’s nothing compared with taking shrapnel and losing an eye, as happened to Marie Colvin in Sri Lanka back in 2001. And yet she would not stop reporting – she kept going to war, wearing a fearsome-looking eye patch. She thought it was her duty to tell the rest of us what she saw.

In her last TV report from Homs she talked about a baby that had been killed by government forces. She hoped that baby’s death might move people outside Syria to do something to stop the ongoing murder of civilians. I don’t know that it will work. But at least she tried. That’s more than most of us can say.