In a Jan. 9 column, the ombudsman for the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo said the paper’s case against the Falha de S. Paulo (São Paulo Failure) parody blog was more harmful than the blog itself.
While in a boat covering former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vacation in the coastal city of Guarujá, two reporters for Folha de S. Paulo newspaper were stopped by a government-run security team and had their equipment confiscated, Folha reports.
Maritânia Forlin, a TV journalist in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, was arrested for allegedly passing information about police operations to criminals in exchange for exclusive stories, RPC TV reports.
A crew for RBS TV, an affiliate of TV Globo in the southern state of Santa Catarina, was attacked and threatened Jan. 6 in the city of Indaial, while investigating charges against five business people accused of boycotting wholesalers in the neighboring city of Brusque, Globo reports.
Transparency and public information access advocates accused the Supreme Federal Court (STF) of censoring information about investigations against politicians and public officials, O Globo reports.
Via YouTube, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has released a series of videos about the impact of violence and the risks journalists confront in the so-called "triple frontier" region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
Recently inaugurated President Dilma Rouseff’s new communications minister, Paulo Bernardo, defended the need for a new regulatory framework for the sector, during his speech at the Jan. 3 handover ceremony, Terra reports.
Because of a Knight Center blog post titled “Brazilian court upholds censorship of title of parody newspaper site,” social media editor of Folha de S. Paulo, Marcos Strecker, sent the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas a note denying that the newspaper had censored any blog.
Brazil’s National Newspaper Association (ANJ) and Google have established new rules for how Google displays and indexes Brazilian news content, O Globo reports. Now, users of Google News will only see one line of each listed story instead of three lines.
A court's decision to shut down an online parody of Folha de S. Paulo has drawn international criticism. The site’s name and address parodied Folha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Journal) with “Falha de S. Paulo” (The São Paulo Failure), which featured criticism and humorous fake headlines from the newspaper. It was taken offline by a September court order, and last week, a São Paulo court upheld the ruling, Portal Imprensa reports.
An unprecedented legal ruling announced this week holds Brazil responsible for the forced disappearance of more than 70 opponents of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) and says the government has violated the right of family members “to seek and receive information and to learn the truth.”
In recent days Brazil has seen various demonstrations in support of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI) issued a statement supporting the publication of documents from a cache of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, arguing that the information is in the public's interest.