I've recently traveled to Iraq and China, where many journalists are paying a very high price for trying to inform their publics.

These are societies with no experience of a free press. Yet I met many Iraqi and Chinese reporters who intuitively grasp the Jeffersonian notion that freedom requires an informed public and a press that serves as a check on official power.

How ironic that, in the United States, the very idea of the Fourth Estate as a guard against abuse of power is under attack.

This irony becomes even more pronounced when one observes the risks many journalists from Iraq, China and other developing countries take to uncover their stories.

Consider Yasser Salihee, a 30-year-old Iraqi doctor who doubled as reporter and translator for Knight Ridder newspapers in Baghdad. Salihee braved tremendous dangers as a Sunni who dared to work with Americans and to investigate the killings of Sunni civilians by Shiite militias. Yasser translated for me. He, like other Iraqi journalists I met, was full of enthusiasm about covering a society struggling to build a representative government. This was the kind of journalism that was never possible under Saddam Hussein.

Yasser was shot dead by a U.S. sniper as he drove home from the barber one June day on a street where no roadblock warned of an American military presence.

Death comes from all sides for members of Iraq's aspiring Fourth Estate. Firas Maadidi, the Mosul bureau chief of the independent pro-democracy Baghdad newspaper As-Saffir, which criticizes insurgent attacks on civilians, was gunned down on Sept. 20. His killers were probably Sunni insurgents.

Gutsy New York Times stringer Fakher Haider was kidnapped and killed on Sept. 19 in Basra, probably by radical Shiite militiamen who have infiltrated the police force. Haider was helping report important stories about the actions of these militias.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 37 Iraqi journalists have been killed on duty since March 2003. That doesn't include journalists killed on their day off such as Yasser Salihee.

Meanwhile, in China, journalists are struggling with how to report on crime, corruption and other misdeeds by government officials in an era of breathtaking change. I met young journalists who grasp the concept that a major part of their role should be to unmask unlawful government behavior.

But they are regularly forbidden to report on such issues as worker protests, deadly mining accidents, forced sterilizations and illegal government seizures of peasants' land. Often local or provincial Chinese officials are acting in cahoots with new private businesses and don't want a newspaper to shine light on their corrupt dealings.

Newspapers that break official bans are closed and editors questioned or jailed. Even bloggers are sometimes imprisoned (three this year, says CPJ) if they criticize party officials or write about other banned news. Yet new Chinese newspapers and Web sites keep popping up that violate these bans.

These Iraqi and Chinese journalists face far greater threats than any American muckraker or investigative reporter ever confronted, yet they risk all to build a free press that will act as a check on government power.

Yet, in the U.S., a confluence of forces is acting to undermine the legitimacy of a press that questions those in power.

On the right, radio and TV talk shows promote the notion that the media should be openly partisan. On the left, critics accuse the "mainstream press" of being a lapdog for the administration. The very idea of an independent press is widely debunked.

Meantime the blogosphere — which leans on links to articles in the major papers — promotes opinion as fact. Wall Street fears about the print media's future viability lead fearful corporate newspaper owners to slash the staffs that can provide genuine facts.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." The journalists I've met in Iraq and China seem to grasp something many Americans have forgotten — or no longer believe.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.