The national telecom regulator, Conatel, has urged that the law governing TV and radio broadcasts be modified to include Internet content, El Universal and El Tiempo report.
Columnist and satirist Laureano Márquez won the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for his independent commentary while under constant harassment from the government of President Hugo Chávez.
The editor of Jornal de Londrina, in Paraná state (south), has petitioned the Supreme Court to suspend a ruling requiring it to pay $353,000 for moral damages to an ex-mayor of Sertanópolis. The editor says the small paper will have to close if it’s obliged to pay.
The National Archive of Brazil’s Revealed Memories project (Memórias Reveladas) – created to facilitate the release of dictatorship-era documents (1964-1985) – is now at the center of a debate between journalists and the authorities after its refusal to release documents during the election, O Globo reports. The document project justified its decision by claiming “journalists were misusing documents and seeking data about candidates involved in the electoral campaign.”
Claiming that "narco-novelas" hurt the social and psychological well-being of children and adolescents, Venezuela's Nacional Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) has forbidden television stations from airing two telenovelas, or soap operas, whose main protagonists are drug dealers, reported El Universal and BBC Mundo.
Claiming that “journalists were misusing documents and seeking data about candidates involved in the electoral campaign,” the National Archive denied researchers access to files, during recent campaigns, about the dictatorship (1964-1985), O Globo reports.
Journalist Paulo Beringhs, host of a news program on the TV Brasil Central channel, funded by the government of Goiás state, declared live that his station received orders not to interview the opposition candidate for governor, Marconi Perillo, Portal Imprensa reports.
During the chaotic episode that began with the police and military protesting and ended in what President Rafael Correa called a coup attempt, Ecuador's media was forced to simulcast the official version of events via a forced link with the state's official channels, reported El Mundo.
The dismissal of psychoanalyst Maria Rita Kehl from her work as a columnist for O Estado de S. Paulo, after writing about the “disqualification” of votes of poor people in Brazil brought accusations of censorship and requests for her reinstatement, Terra Magazine reports.
Laureano Márquez will be one of the journalists to receive an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ) in November for having “risked their freedom and security to report the truth as they see it in their countries.”