Maria Ressa on Protecting Independent Media in the Age of Disinformation

Maria, I'd like to start with a personal question, if I may.

You hold dual Filipino and American citizenship.

You were raised partly in the U.S. after your family fled the Philippines after the declaration of martial law.

But returned to the Philippines to work as a journalist, you were the bureau chief of CNN in Manila and Jakarta from 1995 to 2005. and then headed the newsroom of Philippines' largest broadcaster before you co-founded your own organization, Rappler, in 2011.

These were very early days of digital activism.

It was one of the first digital activist and investigative news sites, and we'll talk about it in detail later.

But let me begin by asking you how this dual perspective has shaped your understanding of the dismantling of democracy in the Philippines and now in the U.S., where it's being destroyed by a thousand small cuts, as you have rightly pointed out.

Oh my gosh, very multi-layered question.

Let me start with the first.

I'm a journalist.

This is my 40th year as a journalist.

I was trained not to be an activist, but to be a broadcast journalist, right? An old style broadcast journalist.

In 1987, we opened the Manila Bureau.

In 1995, I opened the Jakarta Bureau.

And these were incredible times because I was watching...

the meltdown of authoritarian one-man rule in Southeast Asia from 1986 people power revolt in the Philippines.

By 1998, it was the end of almost 32 years of Suharto.

So I covered this transition of these one-man authoritarian rules to democracy, but at the tail end of my career, I began seeing, oh my gosh, we're going backwards.

The pendulum is swinging back.

So the first is, I didn't consider myself an activist until it became clear that, It was a battle for facts.

And when it became a battle for facts, then journalism is activism because we fight for the facts, right? You mentioned death by a thousand cuts.

I meant that in two ways.

What I kept saying is that we hold the line.

These are the lines guaranteed by our constitution.

The Philippines has a constitution patterned after the United States, and we hold the line, right? We tell you the story, and it was before the time when the public information ecosystem was corrupted.