“I am in shock,” were her first words when she learned that she would receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year. But then Maria Ressa quickly recovered and said: “We will keep doing what we are doing.” With her investigative platform “Rappler” she has been uncovering for years how the Philippine head of state Rodrigo Duterte abused his power and cleverly hijacked the possibilities of social media.
Ressa is a woman who does the trick of still exuding great confidence under tremendous pressure and stress. For years she has been fighting as an investigative journalist against state-sanctioned injustice in her home country. It resists the attempts of the powerful to manipulate the internet and social media and to control the free press. She denounces that dictators in many parts of the world are deploying entire troll armies to crush their opponents.
The 58-year-old has always been a valiant opponent of the bloody anti-drug war that President Duterte launched in his country after his election victory. His brutal campaign is estimated to have left tens of thousands dead.
“The government will not be happy,” she said after the price was announced. Your opponents in the Philippines have set in motion many levers in recent years to slow down and intimidate Ressa and her fellow campaigners. They did not silence the journalist. She was temporarily arrested and prosecuted for alleged defamation; they have been inundated with anonymous death threats over the Internet; some announced that they would rape and torture them; others berated her as a whore and a bitch. She endured all this filth – and carried on. That gives her respect not only in her own country, but worldwide.
She started her career at CNN
Her fearlessness, coupled with a detective instinct, does not allow her to give up when she comes across explosive leads. And they can be found almost everywhere in the Philippines, where people are hunted down by death squads or die in official police raids under extremely dubious circumstances, where security forces cover up instead of clearing up, where journalists put their lives at risk every day if they try to expose corruption and abuse.
Maria Ressa didn’t always live in the Philippines. Her parents left home during the Marcos dictatorship and moved to the United States, when she was still a young girl. She later studied molecular biology and theater at Princeton. She returned to Manila when the people revolted against the dictator; the experience of “people power” shaped her.
After her first experience as a reporter, Ressa came to CNN, where she made a career for many years. She worked as an office manager in Manila and Jakarta and at times did a lot of research on al-Qaeda terror networks. Later, when Duterte began his triumphal march, she founded her platform “Rappler” and concentrated on uncovering manipulations and machinations in the Duterte area.