A radio reporter known for his crime reporting was shot dead in the city of Jaguaribe, Ceará on Friday, Feb. 22, according to the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo. He was the second journalist killed in Brazil this year. The first killed also worked for a radio station in a community north of Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazilian media company UH News was sentenced to pay over $7,500 in moral damages, according to the court's website.
While freedom of expression remains a fundamental right guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution, the court system has become an effective tool for crippling media organizations and silencing critical journalists and bloggers in the country. A timeline from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas shows that there were 16 cases of the courts being used to censor journalists in 2012 alone.
A Brazilian court ruled on Wednesday, Feb. 20, that the blog "Falha de São Paulo," a parody of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper will remain offline, reported Carta Capital.
The second witness to the April 2012 murder of Brazilian journalist Décio Sá has died after being shot seven times during an attack in January, said the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo.
The International Press Institute released a statement on Monday, Feb. 18, warning of rising impunity for crimes against journalists in Brazil and insisting the Congress approve a bill that would allow federal authorities to investigate attacks on press workers in the country.
After winning a five-year battle for the right to travel outside Cuba, blogger Yoani Sánchez was met by protestors when she deplaned after arriving at her first international destination, Brazil. Demonstrators in the airport lounge supporting the Castro regime held signs accusing Sánchez of being under the influence of the United States, reported the website Terra.
In the midst of a supposed crisis in investigative journalism and the advertising-based business model that still prevails in the press around the world, successful initiatives that combine financing alternatives for quality journalism promise a future for investigative journalism. In Brazil, one example is A Pública (The Public), an independent, non-profit investigative journalism agency that allows its content to be freely reproduced online. The agency was founded in March 2011 by the journalists Marina Amaral and Natália Viana, who were unsatisfied with the paths chosen by the Brazilian media.
The São Paulo State Union of Professional Journalists denounced threats journalists received and other obstacles they faced while reporting in the interior of the state at the beginning of 2013, according to a statement form the organization on Feb. 13.
The Brazilian National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ in Portuguese) filed a complaint with the Public Ministry in Sergipe on Feb. 8, regarding its criminal proceedings against journalist José Cristian Góes, which began at the end of January because of a fictional post on his blog for the Infonet website.