Brazil's first online presidential debate, provided by Folha de S. Paulo and the website UOL and still available online, attracted more than 1.7 million views during its first day up on the Internet, reported M&M Online. The debate took place Wednesday, Aug. 18.
A group of comedians gathered Sunday, Aug. 22, on the beach of Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro, to demonstrate against a law that bans parodies and jokes about candidates during election campaigns in Brazil, reported O Globo.
The three top candidates heading into the country’s Oct. 3 election, Dilma Rousseff, José Serra, and Marina Silva, have signed onto the Chapultepec Declaration — an international charter, first signed in 1994 in México, that protects freedom of expression and information — at this week’s Brazilian Newspaper Association (ANJ) congress in Rio de Janeiro.
During the wave of violence in Kenya in 2008, that stemmed from conflicts among rival political factions, a group of friends created a system in which persons in various locations could send and share, via the Internet, news about attacks and killings. The Ushahidi (witness in Swahili) online platform became a model of success for participative coverage of news worldwide. Now the system has come to Brazil, with Voter 2010, an unprecedented election monitoring tool for citizens.
This election year, the federal government in Brazil has nearly tripled the number of renewals or new permits for the operation of radio stations across the country, reported Folha de S. Paulo.
Journalists in the interior of Brazil are complaining of various attacks and threats involving politicians and their parties during the ongoing election period. Journalist Bruno de Lima, from the small state of Paraíba, in the northeast of the country, said he had received death threats after publishing stories about pedophilia in the state, explained Paraíba Agora.
Fernando Collor de Mello, a former president and current senator, threatened Hugo Marques, a reporter for IstoÉ magazine, for publishing an article about efforts to invalidate his candidacy for governor of Alagoas state, O Globo reports.
Four journalism organizations are oppenly opposing a new electoral law, enacted three weeks ago, which they say violates free expression. (Read the full text PDF of the law in Spanish here.)
President Evo Morales enacted an electoral law that is drawing criticism from the opposition and the press for being a gag for the media during election times, reported La Razón.
Colombians appear to have been more comfortable with continuity than with change by giving President Álvaro Uribe’s former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, a win with approximately 47 percent of the vote, and putting him into a second-round runoff June 20 with Antanas Mockus, the BBC reports. Several media from around the world were surprised by such a decisive win by Santos, after polls had predicted a tie with Mockus, El Tiempo reports (Spanish).