Brazilian Journalist Receives 2019 International Press Freedom Award

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ will honor four journalists with the 2019 International Press Freedom Awards amid the erosion of press freedom in democracies around the globe.

CPJ says, that these journalists have faced online harassment, legal and physical threats, and imprisonment in their pursuit of the news.

The winners are Brazilian Patricia Campos Mello, Indian Neha Dixit, Nicaraguan Luica Pineda Ubau, and Maxence Melo Mubyazi from Tanzania.

The winners of CPJ’s 2019 International Press Freedom Awards represent the very best of journalism, people who have put their lives and liberty on the line to bring us the news. “While we celebrate their courage, we lament that it is required,” said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. “The sad reality is that around the world, independent journalism is threatened by populist authoritarians who disdain and disparage the work of the independent press. This is true in the countries represented by our honorees and many others.”

Patrícia Campos Mello is an award-winning reporter and columnist at the daily Folha de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s biggest news outlets, and an experienced international correspondent.

She has reported on human rights and public health stories in Brazil, including on babies being born with microcephaly as a result of the Zika virus in 2016.

She has also reported on the war in Afghanistan, the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, the national elections in India, and migration and the refugee crisis in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Turkey, Lebanon, and Kenya.

From 2006 to 2010, she was the Washington correspondent for the Estado de S. Paulo (Estadão) newspaper. Before that, she worked at business and finance publications, including Valor Econômico and Gazeta Mercantil.

In late 2018, during the Brazilian presidential election campaign, Campos Mello was attacked online in response to her coverage of allegations about efforts by a group of businessmen supporting presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro to sponsor bulk messaging on WhatsApp related to the campaign.

After the stories were published, she was threatened on social media and over the phone. Callers made direct threats against her and her family, and social media users shared doctored photos and fake news stories about her.

Besides, details of events in which she planned to participate were shared among hundreds of WhatsApp groups, with calls for Bolsonaro supporters to attend the events and confront her in person.

Campos Mello was forced to cancel all public appearances for more than a month, and her newspaper hired a bodyguard for her. A WhatsApp number for the newspaper Folha was flooded with hundreds of thousands of messages related to her reporting.

The attack on Campos Mello was one of the most visible cases of doxxing in a year and election cycle in which dozens of journalists were harassed and criticized for their reporting.

“I am more cautious in my approach to people in the new government because I worry they are going to use it against me,” Campos Mello told CPJ in December.

Campos Mello received the King of Spain Journalism Prize and the Petrobras Prize in 2018 and the Red Cross International Committee Prize for humanitarian journalism in 2017.