Sacramento Bee editor Melanie Sill devoted her column today to why people should care about the imprisonment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the reporters from San Francisco’s Current TV who were captured by North Korea:

Beyond the local ties, we should support these women for a simple reason: A free society relies on journalists who are willing to take risks to inform the public. …

Getting to the truth has meant taking personal risks and breaking rules for generations of journalists who have covered wars, social movements, disasters, chaos or wrongdoing by those in power.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee don’t work for a storied media organization. They’re part of a new generation, and even as they’ve been imprisoned in North Korea, they have taken plenty of heat back home.

I think such criticism is misplaced. We shouldn’t excoriate journalists for taking risks to get stories. We should celebrate them and the quest for truth they represent. …

Many questions have been raised about the actions and decisions that led to the arrests and imprisonment of Lee and Ling. There’s time enough to review all that when they come home.

For now, though, the cause is simple. Let’s support efforts to free Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

For information on how to help, visit www.lauraandeuna.com, the Web site set up by the journalists’ friends and family.