Mainstream media coverage of Brazilian protests in June, 2013, both on websites and Twitter, highlighted riots and acts of vandalism, rather than demands made by protestors, according to a University of Texas researcher. The findings, which shed light on the role of media in the portrayal of protests, were presented at the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Montreal, Canada.
In a saturated and rapidly evolving digital media landscape, discerning truth from fallacy has proven to be a challenge for readers, especially in the case of government discourse. In response to a growing demand for trustworthy and accurate news, the practice of fact-checking has emerged as a practice that allows journalists to hold public officials accountable for their statements.
The criminal investigation of Peru’s Minister of the Interior for the death of a journalist in 1988 serves as a reminder that the Andean nation still lives and deals with the effects of an internal war that ravaged the country in the late twentieth century.
The ability to cope with a disruptive environment and an awareness of new technological resources are key skills for the 21st century journalist. This was the lesson highlighted by a group of eight students who participated in a recent Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The students won scholarships to attend the 10th Brazilian Congress of Newspapers (CBJ by its initials in Portuguese) and visit the facilities of Google Brasil.
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.”
A leading Venezuelan newspaper that was recently sold to anonymous investors appears to be shifting its opposition editorial line weeks after pledging not to. The managing editor at El Universal, Elides Rojas, told the International Press Institute (IPI) that the newspaper’s new president had “ordered a complete revision of the opinion section” and had suspended or dismissed editorial staff.
As if the dangers of covering crime in one of the riskiest regions of the world for journalists weren’t enough, reporters in Northern Mexico now face new obstacles allegedly created by the authorities who were supposed to protect them.
When Edison Lanza becomes the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression in October he will step into a political battle in the Organization of American States (OAS) over the role of his office in the region.
When a TV journalist was shot to death recently in Tegucigalpa, the police were quick to say the motive had nothing to do with his reporting work. Some publications say he was the 37th a journalist murdered in Honduras since 2003, while others say he was the 45th reporter killed during that same period.
A group of 60 journalists in Nicaragua’s capital city gathered in the offices of the national police to demand investigations into recent attacks on the press, which they allege are going unaddressed.
A new report by Freedom of Expression advocacy organization Article 19-Mexico attributed a continuing trend of attacks against journalists to the Mexican government’s routine failure to prosecute attackers.
Charges of espionage that could result in a 30-year jail sentence were brought against two journalists of the Bolivian newspaper La Razón for publishing alleged state secrets leaked to a reporter by an anonymous source.