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News :: Latin America : Media |
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Plan to regulate journalists stirs outcry in Brazil |
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by Scott Edwards
Email: scottisimo (nospam) hotmail.com (verified) |
23 Sep 2004
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From Chicago Tribune, September 17, 2004
By Kevin G. Hall
A proposal to regulate who can work as a journalist in Brazil is alarming human-rights groups and journalists—so much so that the organization that suggested the licensing requirements agreed Wednesday to seek nationwide public hearings on the issue.
Human-rights groups, foreign and domestic news media and some members of the government have appealed to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to withdraw support for a proposed National Journalism Board.
Da Silva's government introduced the proposal to Congress at the request of the National Federation of Journalists, a group made up largely of unionized press officers for government agencies.
Da Silva's government, however, has refused to disown the proposal, and the president made clear Wednesday that he still feels stung by a report in The New York Times earlier this year that he had a drinking problem.
"It's clear that, as a citizen, I can suffer intimately the presence of an injustice committed through whatever error in the press," he told the National Newspapers Association.
But da Silva, who tried to expel the correspondent who wrote The New York Times story before backing down, promised to oppose any restrictions on press freedoms. "The best recipe for the vigor of journalism is, without doubt, liberty," he said.
Free-press advocates are skeptical of his sincerity after comments by his chief policy strategist, Luiz Gushiken, that "nothing is absolute, not even freedom of the press."
The licensing proposal was officially made by the National Federation of Journalists.
Five of the group's seven directors are members of da Silva's Workers' Party, and most of the directors aren't working journalists but current or former press secretaries.
Under the plan, the federation's directors would select the first journalism board. That board in return could require a journalism degree and yank the credentials of journalists it deemed unethical.
Federation President Sergio Murillo de Andrade, a journalism professor, acknowledged that most of the directors are members of the ruling party but said the idea behind a journalism board wasn't to restrict the work of reporters but to create minimum professional requirements.
Right now, "any person can join our profession," Andrade said, suggesting that the proposal doesn't differ from the licensing of architects or real estate agents. "The idea of professionalization is to create quality and value for our profession."
No major news organization or journalist has backed the proposal.
Brazil's media barons, independent lawmakers and the group Reporters Without Borders have warned that the plan smacks of a return to the authoritarian 1970s, when the country's military rulers clamped down on critics.
"Journalists don't need to be regulated; they are muckrakers by nature. They know what they want, and the readers and companies for whom they work are who regulates them," said Congressman Fernando Gabiera, an independent lawmaker from Rio de Janeiro who is also a journalist and author. "This is a giant mistake for the government. It sounds like something they have in Cuba or other socialist countries where the media is organized by the parties."
William Bonner, Brazil's top television anchor, slammed the proposal as "intimidation." "Whatever organ that represents a threat to the freedom of information, whatever name it has, whatever origin it has, must be emphatically rejected," Bonner told the newsmagazine Veja.
Recognizing the controversy, the federation's Andrade said Wednesday that the group now advocates public hearings on the issue, a position the government also supports.
"It is extremely important to get opinions from society, and opinions from people who would benefit from this board," Andrade said. "Not to have a debate about this would be authoritarian."
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