Just seven months from the upcoming presidential elections in Venezuela, attacks against the press have intensified, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Mexican radio and TV media owners filed a petition asking the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate and review the pending sanctions against radio and television stations imposed by election officials, reported the newspaper Milenio.
As presidential elections in Venezuela approach, President Hugo Chavez on Saturday, March 24, criticized the alleged assaults on journalists of the state-run National System of Public Media committed by supporters of the opposition, according to the website for the Venezuelan National Assembly.
A mayoral candidate in Honolulu is trying to get a reporter he doesn't like thrown off the campaign trail, reported the Honolulu Civil Beat.
The National Chamber of the Radio and TV Industry (CIRT in Spanish), which represents the majority of the radio and TV companies in Mexico, announced that it would appeal to international bodies to denounce the current electoral law, which limits freedom of expression and press freedom, reported the newspaper El Universal.
Because of the recent attacks on press freedom and freedom of expression in Ecuador, the country's president, Rafael Correa, has been criticized in recent days by various journalistic organizations, according to the newspaper La Hora.
An Ecuadoran law prohibiting the media from reporting on elections went into effect Saturday, Feb. 4, reported the news agency Agencia de Noticias del Ecuador y Sudamérica.
U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich faced off with CNN's John King during the South Carolina debate Thursday, Jan, 19, accusing the "destructive, vicious, negative" media of making it "harder to govern this country," reported Politico. Following the debate, which King moderated, CNN’s David Gergen said on the air that Gingrich's anti-media rant represented "one of the harshest attacks that we’ve had on the press that I can remember in a long, long time,” Politico added.
After Canadian Twitter users defied a decades-old ban by tweeting last year's election results before polls had closed throughout the country, the government announced Friday, Jan. 13 -- via Twitter, no less -- the repeal of the section of the Canada Elections Act that prohibits the broadcast or transmission of election results before all ballots have been cast, reported the Huffington Post Canada.
Ecuador's National Assembly has approved President Rafael Correa's changes to the Democracy Code, which goes into effect Feb. 4 and prohibits news media from transmitting beneficial or harmful messages about candidates, reported El Diario.
Campaign trail coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on Tuesday, Jan. 3, is in full swing. By the end of December, the campaign was the most-covered story in U.S. media for the fifth time in seven weeks, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Bolivia’s National Association of the Press denounced restrictions from a new campaign rule, saying the regulation impeded journalists’ ability to effectively cover the Andean country’s first judicial elections held Oct. 16, reported IFEX.