In the midst of the bribery and phone-hacking scandal involving CEO Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., media analysts continue to debate the ethical challenges of reporting. Are their limits to what a journalist should do in the search for a scoop?
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that Congress will consider a new media regulation law that will help fight "ink assassins," as he refers to opposition journalists, and that will be the "best legacy" of his administration, reported Fundamedios.
The Supreme Court of Peru sent a bill to Congress that would imprison those who distribute recordings of private conversations obtained by illegal telephone wiretaps, Perú21 reports. Freedom of expression groups said the bill was an attempt to restrict press freedom and weaken the tools used to watchdog the authorities, Diario Ya explains.
In a July 12 ceremony in Washington, D.C., Brazil and the United States outlined a new multilateral initiative, the "Open Government Partnership" (OGP), which aims to find ways to combat corruption and promote transparency, according to a U.S. State Department statement and the newspaper O Globo.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, criticized Brazil's resistance to dealing with its past and the way that state information is being handled, O Estado de S. Paulo reports.
With more than 800 attendees registered, the 6th International Congress for Investigative Journalism held June 30-July 2 and hosted by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI in Portuguese), was the largest yet. More than half of the participants were journalists from throughout Brazil who came to the conference in São Paulo to help make it one of the country's top such events.
On July 7 and 8, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Brazil’s Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) will hold a seminar on policies regulating access to public information in Brasília.
Starting this Thursday, June 30, the 6th International Investigative Journalism Congress will be held in São Paulo, organized by the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association (Abraji in Portuguese).
Some scholars link the presence of a freedom of information law in a county to its level of social and economic development. After all, the first country to pass such a law was Sweden, a nation that charts highly on human development indices. The second was Finland, another place considered among the best in the world to live. The United States was the third country to pass a law guaranteeing access to public information.
The Brazilian government said it will no longer wade into the fight over adding a permanent secrecy provision to the information access law that is pending in Congress, Correio Braziliense and Folha de S. Paulo report. The amendment would allow top-secret documents to remain classified indefinitely.
Press, legal, and human rights groups are united in their opposition to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s decision to allow permanent secrecy for official documents as part of a pending information access law.
Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE in Spanish) is considering a bill that would regulate the right of reply during the election campaign period that would effectively require the media to publish for free all of the responses of political parties and candidates who feel aggrieved by a news article, according to El Universal.