Mexican reporter Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, who is seeking asylum in the U.S., was released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in El Paso on the afternoon of July 26 after seven months in detention.
Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, director of IDL-Reporteros, and his colleague and cofounder Romina Mella, presented a constitutional complaint for protection before the Constitutional Court of the Superior Court of Justice of Lima, for the continuous and aggressive demands toward their news site.
So at a time when government control over the media is increasing and news sites can be blocked or thrown offline, Dariela Sosa and her team decided to launch a newsletter instead. The result was Soy Arepita, a free email newsletter that makes its way to Venezuelans inboxes every morning, just in time for breakfast.
The Knight Center took advantage of the 13th International Congress of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji), which gathered 750 people from June 28 to 30 in São Paulo, to listen to Latin American journalists speak about mistakes made and lessons learned during several years on the beat. From misguided assumptions to care taken with source protection, they offer lessons for novices and veterans in the field.
Mexico held historic elections on July 1 with a landslide victory from Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And in an electoral season of unprecedented violence against politicians and political candidates, the press was also a target.
Journalists and radio broadcasters at Empresa Brasileira de Comunicação (Brazil Communication Company, or EBC), a federal public agency, protested on March 20 against direction given by company managers to reduce coverage of the murders of Marielle Franco, a city councilor for Rio de Janeiro, and her driver Anderson Gomes, both killed in a March 14 shooting.
"What better way to do it than from an exercise of rewriting headlines that, even though they are sometimes thought to be well written from the point of view of generating information, if you look at them with a much more conscious focus of reality, you can discover that they contain sexist elements," Andrés Mompotes, deputy director of El Tiempo, told the Knight Center.
Ecuadoran Secretary of Communication Andrés Michelena confirmed that new President Lenin Moreno’s government is not contributing economically to multi-state owned cable news channel Telesur, newspaper La Hora reported.
Everyone wants to be masters of memory and omission, wrote French historian Jacques Le Goff in the early 1980s, about the disputes between different social groups for the collective memory of a society. In studying the relationship between communication and history, Brazilian communicator Marialva Barbosa took up the idea of Le Goff to affirm that journalists are also "masters of memory," since on a daily basis they select and determine what should be remembered and what can be forgotten.
In the early morning hours of March 28, journalist Julio Omar Gómez's house was set on fire in Baja California Sur and the bodyguard charged with protecting his life was shot and killed. About 24 hours later and across the country, Armando Arrieta Granados was shot while arriving home in Veracruz. Both journalists escaped, but one is in the hospital in serious condition.