Brazil
Journalists fight for press freedomPosted Mar 16 2011
Press freedom has been a point of interest in Brazil for the past couple of months. Last month, President Dilma Rousseff asked her government officials and minister of communications to look into ratifying the constitution to allow more freedom for electronic media.
Journalists have been pushing to make the ratifications to the constitution in terms of laws governing communications.
Currently, the Brazilian Press is starting an initiative to have journalists in the country have a degree requirement, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reports.
The union, called Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas (FENAJ), will caravan to Brasilia to meet from March 23-25 with governmental leaders to discuss ways in which the federal district can enforce the requirement for journalists to have formal education in their field. In their newsletter, FENAJ also seeks the aid of professors, students, universities, and other state and regional institutions in spreading the movement. FENAJ hopes to have the movement spread, even after the Day of the Journalist, on April 7.
Last week, one of the top regional military officials, Colonel Elías Augusto Siquiera de Souza, was fired for pressuring a journalist to reveal a military source, reports Folha de Pernambuco.
In a blog post, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas writes that the journalist, João Valaderes, from the newspaper Jornal de Commercio, was pressured by Souza to reveal the identities of military soldiers who were anonymously sourced in articles that chronicles problems in Pernambuco’s Military Firefighter Corps.