As part of its series of occasional e-books, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas just launched “Transparency and Accountability: Journalism and access to public information in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
This e-book is a special report of the 11th Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas, a roundtable conference organized last year by the Knight Center, gathering journalists and experts from a dozen countries from throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Click here to download this e-book now for free in a PDF file.
The e-book contains 12 chapters that form a snapshot of the access-to-public-information situation in 11 Latin American countries and the Caribbean Region. Since the turn of the century, many countries in the region adopted Freedom of Information laws in an attempt to overcome the culture of secrecy that has characterized public administration throughout history.
In the foreword of the e-book, professor Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center, says that after the wave of democratization that swept the region in the last quarter of the last century, journalists in Latin America started searching for a missing piece to complement other democratic reforms: more transparency of public administration.
“Journalists wondered: what do we do with the freedom to publish if governments don’t answer our questions, don’t provide crucial information about what they do?” said professor Alves, referring to the support journalists and the media have given to Freedom of Information laws in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Despite the growing recognition – at least on the part of journalists and civil society – that freedom of information and democracy go hand in hand, governments in general have been reluctant to adopt or comply with laws that run counter to a culture of silence firmly embedded in Latin American and Caribbean countries,” notes Summer Harlow, who edited the e-book. She just earned her Ph.D. from the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
The e-book is a compilation of the presentations during the 11th Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas that took place at the Knight Center in November of 2013. A list of the main chapters follows:
Click here to download this e-book now for free in a PDF file.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
