Letter from New York: Two friends of TCDS, Leonardo Sakamoto and Gazeta Wyborcza, nominated for 2016 Press Freedom Prize
Written by Mayra Cotta Cardozo De Souza, Ph.D. Student in Politics at NSSR, and TCDS Program Assistant.
We have just learned that Leonardo Sakamoto, 2015 Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research, and a close collaborator of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, has been nominated for the 2016 Press Freedom Prize by Reporters without Borders.
Based in Paris, RSF (Reporters sans Frontières) is one of the most prominent organizations supporting freedom of speech throughout the world. The award was launched 25 years ago, and this year it will be awarded in three separate categories – to a journalist, a media outlet, and a citizen journalist. The ceremony will take place in Strasbourg on November 8th.
Leonardo Sakamoto is one of 7 nominees in the category Citizen Journalist, which is described by RSF as follows: When the traditional media are unable to fulfill their role properly, citizen journalists and bloggers take over the job of providing independently-reported news and information, often eliciting an angry response from the authorities.
Sakamoto is a São Paulo-based former war reporter, whose eponymous daily blog on human rights abuses in Brazil is one of the country’s most widely-read online publications. He is a major voice in the struggle against contemporary slavery, recognized both in Brazil, through his NGO, Reporter Brasil, and internationally, as a Member of the Board of the UN Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.
As a result of his daring engagement, he has been the target of death threats, hate speech, smear campaigns, and legal charges, by those whose whom he holds responsible . He was subjected to especially virulent online attacks in January 2016 after someone posing as him criticized the “uselessness of retired people” in an interview for the daily Edição do Brasil, which had failed to check its interviewee’s identity. In April 2016, a leading agro-industrial company he had criticized orchestrated an online smear campaign that accused him of taking money from the government to attack its opponents. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a book entitled “What I Learned from Being Cursed Online.”
You may remember Leonardo Sakamoto from his remarkable and engaging TCDS talk given last year at the New School, “ What I learned being cursed on line”. (See a video of the talk below)
We are also pleased to learn that in the category Media Outlet, one of the nominees is Gazeta Wyborcza, founded in 1989 by Adam Michnik (recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from The New School in 1984 and a TCDS Visiting Professor in Democracy, 1995 & 2000). This pro-European daily published in Poland became a symbol of opposition to the excesses of the ruling populist Law and Justice Party, which is waging an all-out crusade against the media.
(2016 Reporters Without Borders-TV5 Monde Prize for Press Freedom)
