Federal prosecutors in Brazil charged American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in bringing to light cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force. In a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, accused Greenwald of being part of a “criminal organization” that hacked into the cellphones of several prosecutors and other public officials last year. Greenwald, an ardent critic of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is a deeply polarizing figure in Brazil, where his work is lionized by leftists and condemned as partisan and heavy handed by officials in the Bolsonaro administration. The news organization Greenwald co-founded, The Intercept Brasil, published articles last year based on the leaked cellphone messages that raised questions about the integrity and the motives of key members of Brazil’s justice system.
Source: New York Times
The Luanda Leaks investigation shows how Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman. A leaked trove of financial and business records reveals how she moved hundreds of millions of dollars in public money out of one of the poorest countries on the planet and into a labyrinth of companies and subsidiaries, many of them in offshore secrecy jurisdictions around the world. The records also show how Western financial firms, lawyers, accountants and government officials — from Lisbon to London and Luanda, from Malta to Dubai — were only too happy to help. The investigation is largely based on more than 715,000 documents obtained by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa. Over more than eight months, more than 120 journalists from ICIJ and 36 media organizations in 20 countries pursued leads in the documents and plumbed their significance.
Source: ICIJ
Press freedom advocates and leading Bangladeshi citizens are condemning arrest warrants issued for top daily Prothom Alo editor Matiur Rahman and nine others in that country. The case, filed over the accidental death of a school boy during a youth group event, appears targeted to punish the outspoken paper for its tough watchdog reporting. In a joint statement Friday, 47 eminent citizens called the case politically motivated.
Source: Prothom Alo
UK-based rights groups are urging Azerbaijan to lift investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova's travel ban. Ismayilova was detained in December 2014 and sentenced in September 2015 to seven-and-a-half years in prison on trumped-up charges. She was conditionally released in May 2016, but three and a half years later still remains subject to a travel ban and has been unable to leave the country. Lawyers will be seeking permission for Ismayilova to travel to the UK to give evidence in the trial of Paul Radu, a Romanian journalist who is co-founder and executive director of OCCRP. Radu is being sued for defamation in London by Azerbaijani MP, Javanshir Feyziyev, over two articles in OCCRP’s award-winning Azerbaijan Laundromat series about money-laundering out of Azerbaijan. Ismayilova, OCCRP’s lead reporter in Azerbaijan, is a key witness in the case.
Source: RSF
The Reuters Institute identified five trends for 2020 and published five looking forward essays by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Meera Selva, Richard Fletcher, Lucy Kueng, and Eduardo Suárez in their recent report Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2020. On the cards: More websites will demand registration details in return for content; elections around the world will be another chance for purveyors of misinformation and disinformation to try new tactics to overwhelm platform defences; feature-rich headphones will give a further boost to audio formats; 5G networks will continue to roll out around the world; transcription, automated translation, and speech-to-text text-to-speech services will be some of the first AI-driven technologies to reach mass adoption.
Source: Reuters Institute
A study by researchers Patrick Ferrucci and Jacob L. Nelson explores how the rise in foundation funding is effecting newsrooms. This study, which was published in the journal Media and Communication in December, utilizes more than 40 interviews with journalists at digitally native nonprofit news organizations and employees from foundations that fund nonprofit journalism to better understand the impact of foundation funding on journalistic practice. The study, entitled, The New Advertisers: How Foundation Funding Impacts Journalism, explores the rapidly expanding role of foundations as a revenue source for news publishers, which raises an important questions about how foundations exercise their influence over the newsrooms they fund.
Source: Media and Communication
