Lusa's News Director Steps Down After Eight Years, Calling Her Position Untenable Once the Board Offered Her an Exit

Luísa Meireles, the director of news at Lusa, Portugal's state-owned news agency, is leaving after eight years, having accepted an exit offered by the agency's board. She told the newsroom on Thursday that her position "had become untenable" over time.

"I signed my agreement to terminate my employment contract this morning. I am leaving on the 12th," she told staff. Her last day is Monday, 12 October.

The departure comes in the middle of a fight over who controls the agency that supplies most Portuguese newsrooms, including the English-language ones, with their daily wire copy. In September the media regulator found that the government's rewrite of Lusa's statutes did not comply with the law, and five parties have since put forward rival plans for its governance.

"A dismissal, live"

Meireles said she had tried to make the news directorate both "a bridge and a barrier" between the journalists and the Conselho de Administração (Board of Directors), and that in eight years she never interfered with journalists' editorial choices.

She traced her exit to a parliamentary hearing on 29 September, at which the board chairman, Joaquim Carreira, answered MPs' questions about the agency. Asked by the Socialist MP Paulo Lopes Silva whether the news leadership would change, Carreira said that "no intention to change the news directorate" had reached Lusa, but added that the current director "is reaching the legal age limit" for the post and also sits on the Comissão da Carteira Profissional de Jornalista (Journalists' Professional Licence Committee, CCPJ), the body that issues Portuguese press cards. He said there "could be changes" arising from possible conflicts of interest, and that the matter was not fully settled.

Meireles told staff that what she watched that day was "a dismissal, live". She said she then asked the board for clarification, and it made her an offer to leave. "My answer is: I am leaving. I accept your proposal and I am leaving this week," she said.

The board's version

In a statement to +M, the media title of the business news site ECO, the board thanked Meireles and confirmed that "the parties reached agreement on the terms" of her departure. It noted that she turns 70 in November and credited her with projects including Lusa Verifica, the agency's fact-checking service. It said the new news leadership would be announced shortly, and thanked her deputies, Nuno Simas and Maria de Deus Rodrigues. Meireles will now chair the CCPJ full time; the committee's own website lists her as its president.

Meireles was appointed on 1 October 2018 by the then chairman, Nicolau Santos, and was reappointed by Carreira in 2021.

The wider dispute

At the same hearing Carreira denied receiving political pressure "from the current or the previous minister" and said the board had taken its decisions "without any interference". A week earlier Meireles had warned the same committee that bringing "the political element" into a supervisory body at a public media company "distorts the logic of editorial criteria".

The statutes approved this year widened Lusa's board to three members, all chosen by the government as sole shareholder, and deferred until 2030 the requirement for an advisory council to give its opinion on board appointments. The committee is now weighing bills from the Partido Socialista (Socialist Party), Iniciativa Liberal (Liberal Initiative), the Partido Comunista Português (Portuguese Communist Party) and Livre, plus a resolution from Chega. All four bills would take the choice of the board away from the government and give it to a new council.

Whoever succeeds Meireles will take over a newsroom whose independence parliament has yet to settle in law.