Google this week released an online digital tool designed to track censorship around the world, according to the BBC.
Senators said they will approve without any changes the controversial anti-racism law proposed by Bolivian President Evo Morales, reported La Razón. The document was approved by the lower house already, and is under discussion in the senate.
“Never let fear become an editor,” said Peruvian Gustavo Gorriti at the award ceremony for the Cemex+FNPI New Journalism Prize in Monterrey, Mexico. The reporter, honored for his outstanding track record of investigative coverage, asked his fellow journalists to not let “intimidation undermine your work,” La Jornada and Milenio report.
Carlos García-Pérez, member of the influential National Cuban American Foundation (FNCA), on Wednesday, Sept. 22, was confirmed as head of Radio and TV Martí, stations financed by the U.S. government to counteract the censorship in Cuba.
In a meeting with representatives of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Mexico's President Felipe Calderón vowed to put in place by October a plan to protect journalists, similar to one in Colombia, and to launch legal reforms that would make killings of journalists a federal crime, reported the Associated Press and IAPA.
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has created a map depicting media censorship in Brazil leading up to the Oct. 3 elections for president, governors, and federal and state senators and representatives.
In the wake of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s statements accusing the press of acting like a political party, unions, several worker groups, government partisans, social movement activists, and progressive bloggers are planning an “action against media coup-ism” this Thursday, Sept. 23, at the headquarters of the São Paulo Journalists’’ Union, O Globo reports.
"In no way should anyone promote a truce or negotiate with criminals who are precisely the ones causing anxiety for the public, kidnapping, extorting and killing." With these words, Alejandro Poire, security spokesman for President Felipe Calderon, criticized the editorial in El Diario de Juárez in which the newspaper asked for a truce with organized crime after the killing of one of its photographers, reported the Associated Press and BBC.
Journalists at the Miami Herald are complaining about the newspaper's gratuitous use of Twitter, according to The Guardian.
With "Right to Know Day" coming up Sept. 28, the freedom of expression group Article 19 has launched a draft method of a tool designed to analyze countries' information laws.
Almost two years after crossing the border from Mexico, journalist Jorge Luis Aguirre was granted asylum in the United States, reported La Jornada. The editor of the news site LaPolaka.com had gone into exile after receiving threats when he went to the funeral of slain reporter Armando Rodríguez in Ciudad Juárez. At the time, Aguirre was warned that he was next.
After one of its photographers was killed by gunmen Thursday, Sept. 16, the Mexican newspaper Diario de Juárez, in an unprecedented move, published an extensive editorial on Sunday, Sept. 19, asking for a truce with drug cartels that would end the violence and, above all, stop the attacks against journalists in Mexico, reported CNN and the Associated Press. Newspaper editors also clarified that the call for peace does not mean the newspaper is giving up its journalistic work.