Veteran Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Friday, has battled multiple legal cases and online abuse in her campaign for press freedom under President Rodrigo Duterte.
The former CNN correspondent co-founded investigative news site Rappler in 2012, bringing together multimedia reporting and social media to offer an edgy take on Philippine current events.
Ressa, 58, has been a vocal critic of Duterte and the deadly drug war he launched in 2016, triggering what media advocates say is a grinding series of criminal charges, probes and online attacks against her and Rappler.
She was named a Time Person of the Year in 2018 for her work on press freedom, but a series of arrests and one conviction for cyber libel further grew her international profile and drew more attention to her struggle.
Rappler has had to fight for survival as Duterte's government accused it of violating a constitutional ban on foreign ownership in securing funding, as well as tax evasion.
It has also been accused of cyber libel — a new criminal law introduced in 2012, the same year Rappler was founded.
Duterte has attacked the website by name, calling it a "fake news outlet", over a story about one of his closest aides.
Though the government has said that it has nothing to do with any of the cases against her, press freedom advocates disagree.
Yet through the campaign against her, Ressa, who is also a US citizen, has remained based in the Philippines and continued to speak out against Duterte's government despite the risks.
Ressa is on bail pending an appeal against a conviction last year in a cyber libel case, for which she faces up to six years in prison.
It is one of seven cases she is fighting after two cyber libel suits were dismissed earlier this year.
– Threats and abuse –
Ressa's position at the head of the Rappler news site meant getting, by her own estimate, up to 90 abusive messages per hour online at one point towards the end of 2016.
The threats came in the months after Duterte took power and launched his narcotics crackdown that rights groups estimate has killed tens of thousands of people.
Rappler was among the domestic and foreign media outlets that published shocking images of the killings and questioned its legal basis.
International Criminal Court judges have authorised a full-blown investigation into a possible crime against humanity during the bloody campaign.
It was an entirely new set of threats for Ressa, who was a veteran of conflict zones before co-founding Rappler.
As CNN's former bureau chief in Manila and Jakarta, Ressa specialised in terrorism, where she tracked the links between global networks like Al-Qaeda and militants in Southeast Asia.
The Princeton graduate later returned to the Philippines to serve as news chief at the nation's top broadcaster ABS-CBN, which has also fallen foul of the Duterte administration.
Ressa's new book "How to stand up to a dictator" is due to be released ahead of the country's 2022 presidential elections, which Duterte is not allowed to contest due to constitutional term limits, although he is planning to run for the Senate.
But the son and namesake of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos has a commanding lead among front runners for the top job.
After the Nobel Prize was announced in October, Ressa was defiant in her defence of her battle for freedom of expression and independent journalism.
"What we have to do as journalists is just hold the line," she said.
Nobel winner Ressa says social media firms fuelling 'toxic sludge'
Oslo (AFP) Dec 10, 2021 –
Accepting her Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa launched a vitriolic attack against US tech giants, accusing them of fuelling a flood of "toxic sludge" on social media.
Ressa, the co-founder of news website Rappler, accepted this year's prize at a ceremony at Oslo's City Hall together with her co-laureate Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, one of the rare independent newspapers in a Russian media landscape largely under state control.
Speaking to a scaled-down crowd due to the pandemic, 58-year-old Ressa attacked "American internet companies" such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without mentioning them by name.
"With its god-like power", their technology "has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger and hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world," she said.
"Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that's coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritised by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us," she said.
Ressa stressed the importance of reliable facts at a time when the world is battling the Covid-19 pandemic or facing upcoming elections in countries like France, the United States, the Philippines and Hungary.
These companies "are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are — by design — dividing us and radicalising us," she said.
A vocal critic of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly drug war, Ressa is herself facing seven criminal lawsuits in her country, which she said could see her sent to prison for 100 years.
Currently on bail pending an appeal against a conviction last year in a cyber libel case, she had to apply to four courts for permission to travel to Norway for Friday's ceremony.
– Minute of silence –
Her co-laureate Muratov, 60, meanwhile called for a minute of silence during the Nobel ceremony to honour all journalists killed in the line of duty.
"I want journalists to die old," he said.
Known for its investigations into corruption and human rights abuses in Chechnya, Novaya Gazeta has seen six of its journalists killed since the 1990s, including famed investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in 2006.
"Journalism in Russia is going through a dark time," Muratov said in his acceptance speech, noting that over 100 journalists, media outlets, human rights defenders and NGOs have recently been branded as "foreign agents" by Russia's justice ministry.
The "foreign agent" label is meant to apply to people or groups that receive funding from abroad and are involved in any kind of "political activity".
But it has also been slapped on Kremlin-critical journalists and media, making their work exceedingly difficult.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the Nobel was not a "shield" protecting journalists, Muratov said he did not expect his newspaper to be given the status.
"During the 30 years lifetime that our newspaper has had, we have done so much positive and good for the country that announcing us as foreign agents would be deteriorating for the country's power" and "a stupid thing to do," he told AFP in an interview.
– Record number of jailed journalists –
According to a report compiled by Reporters Without Borders up to December 1, at least 1,636 journalists have been killed around the world in the past 20 years, including 46 since the beginning of the year.
In addition, the number of journalists imprisoned around the world has never been higher, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, with 293 currently behind bars.
"Bringing the story to the public may in itself be a prevention of war," the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said.
"The role of the press is to reveal aggression and abuse of power, thereby contributing to peace."
The Oslo ceremony also saw the head of the World Food Programme, the 2020 Peace Prize laureate, give his Nobel lecture. Last year's festivities had been cancelled due to the pandemic.
This year's other Nobel laureates in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics would normally have received their prizes at a separate ceremony in Stockholm on Friday.
But due to the Covid situation, they accepted their awards in their home towns earlier this week.
A ceremony was held in their honour at Stockholm's City Hall on Friday, attended by the royal family among others.
