Anna Politkovskaya

And all the rest of the billionaires immediately fell into line.

When one of the when the press outlets started talking about what Putin was up to, reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her apartment building's elevator.

And suddenly the Russian press got real quiet.

Now, it's been tried here before, too, not with the executions, but, you know, with the intimidation.

What I've come to realize is that the journalism that has meant the most to me, that in my view has mattered the most in some of the most challenging environments in the world, wasn't done by journalists who were trained in those values or indeed believed in those values, and they didn't believe in them because they weren't relevant to the context, the societies, the political cultures within which they were working.

So my book roves from Anna Politkovskaya, the extraordinarily courageous journalist who took on the truth about Vladimir Putin in Putin's early days as President of the Russian Federation.

It talks about Daphne Caruana Galizia, the amazing journalist in Malta, who took on systematic corruption at the top of politics and business in her small island.

And I mentioned those two at, at the beginning because, of course, both of those women were assassinated, murdered for their journalism, but neither of them would in any way, I think, characterize themselves as utterly impartial.

We believe that journalism was just one part of the, the tapestry of a democratic society.

In many of the countries where I'm profiling the work of journalists, they can't present their reporting and assume that the other institutions within their political system will respond to their reporting.

And that's why from Anna Politkovskaya in Russia to Lidia Cacho in Mexico to Hopewell Chin'ono in Zimbabwe, these reporters felt it was incumbent upon them to go further, to actually become, in a sense, activists.

And there's that phrase I, I talk about in the book that came from Maria, Maria Ressa, the, uh, Filipina Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist who said, "In my country, I wasn't just a journalist.

I'm going to pick one partly because of today, we're talking to each other on October 7th.

And October 7th is the 20th anniversary of the murder, the assassination of an extraordinarily courageous Russian woman journalist called Anna Politkovskaya.

And Anna Politkovskaya spent years of her professional life ringing an alarm bell about Vladimir Putin, trying to tell both Russians and the world just how committed Putin was to restoring a form of Soviet-style repression added to deep corruption.

It was his ambition to use KGB-style power, and he was a former agent of the KGB, to reinforce a sort of post-Soviet imperial notion of Russian power.

And he did that first by declaring a war against the Chechens inside one of those small republics inside the Russian Federation, which was the most brutal, awful military campaign involving systemic abuse of human rights, mass murder.

Look at what we saw in the case of just a couple days ago, Vladimir Putin's birthday.

It was not only the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Ukrainian-born journalist Anna Politkovskaya, but she was killed for speaking up about the Putin regime, saying that Vladimir Putin, he lacked any sort of serious education.

He wasn't intelligent.

He was just a KGB thug.

But also, he had started, you know, encroaching on the Russian press.

Anna Politkovskaya, famed investigative reporter, had been killed on his birthday in her stairwell in two thousand and six.

Uh, a Russian TV channel was taken off the air, right? Like, it's starting to become more authoritarian, obviously, but the Russian press, uh, the foreign press at that point is completely left alone to report however we saw fit.

Uh, and, you know, as we understood it, the Kremlin was concerned with what a Russian audience is consuming at home in terms of information, uh, but a foreign press sort of gives it cover abroad.

It wasn't a deliberate choice, but it just so happens, and I've thought long and hard about why it might be the case, that some of the most courageous, the most brilliant, the most resilient and tenacious reporting of the last 50 years that truly has made a difference around the world has been done by women journalists.

You mentioned Anna Politkovskaya.

She was assassinated, and I think I can go out on a limb and say there is no doubt that Vladimir Putin and his key associates in the Kremlin ordered her assassination back in 2006.

Another woman who I couldn't talk to in person because she's dead is Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta.

whose work leaves my jaw dropped, frankly, because the deeper I dived into what they had done, the more I learned about the risks they took and the refusal they had to give up on their stories, the more I was just left with profound admiration for them.

Maybe we should pick up on one of those stories.

Our society has shown limitless apathy is your eighth chapter from Anna Politkovskaya.

And as you say, she died as a result of it.