The journalist, who is facing prison in the Philippines, talks about the dark side of social media and why truth is being eroded in politics
• Exclusive extract: Maria Ressa and her lawyer Amal Clooney on their fight for justice
When Maria Ressa jointly won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 with Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, they were the first journalists to be recognised in this way since 1936. Back then, the German reporter Carl von Ossietzky couldn’t accept because he was in a Nazi concentration camp. “The Norwegian Nobel committee got the right sense,” Ressa tells me, over Zoom from her office in Manila. “They gave the awards to journalists last year and this year to civil society.” The 2022 prize went to human rights advocates from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Her point is that, along with journalists, these are the last ramparts against authoritarianism that’s creeping, not at all slowly, across the globe. “It’s like that Martin Niemöller quote. In the Philippines, as a joke, we’ve been saying since 2017: ‘First, they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened next.’”
Slight, effervescent and with a garish tangerine lipstick that turns out to be a filter – Ressa is both puckish and techy – the 59-year-old apologises: she’s four minutes late because she has come straight from the supreme court of the Philippines. The government has lodged multiple specious charges against her, from cyber libel to tax evasion, which cumulatively carry a maximum sentence of more than 100 years. She had an appeal denied last week and is in the final stages of this “upside-down” process.
