In January, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa will take to the stage in New Albany. In 2021, she became the first journalist to win the prize, jointly with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov, since 1935.
Ressa is the co-founder, executive editor and CEO of Rappler, a top online-only news site in the Philippines known for its in-depth reporting.
Her fight for truth has come with a price in her home country of the Philippines, where her work covering corruption and malicious acts by an autocratic regime has landed her in legal trouble with the government that could see her jailed for many years, despite the shaky ground from which the charges were constructed. If she is jailed, Ressa has warned it would be a harbinger of the end of freedom of the press in the Philippines.
She released her third book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, in November.
Ressa’s run-ins with the government and anti-journalist attackers escalated in 2016, she explains in How to Stand Up to a Dictator which Rappler published a series of stories about Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte regime’s weaponization of the internet against citizens, how it silenced those seeking to hold him accountable, and how those actions cleared the way for the support of the drug war and illegal killings of Filipino people.
“In the moment, we were caught in a cycle that went like this: My team would publish information about the corruption of the Duterte administration; the administration would launch unabated attacks and targeted harassment against us; those attacks would be amplified across the social web to tear down our reputation and confuse the public; and platforms like Facebook would cash in on the confusion,” Ressa writes in an excerpt of her new book published in The Atlantic.
Ressa founded Rappler following a high-profile journalism career in the United States. A dual U.S.-Filipino citizen, she first moved to New Jersey at age 9.
She attended Princeton University and earned a degree in English. After winning a Fulbright Fellowship, she attended graduate school at the University of the Philippines and taught courses there from 1986 to 1991. She was vice president of a post-production company in Manila and an executive producer for governmental station PTV 4 before joining CNN in 1988.
At CNN, she was the Manila Bureau Chief until 1995, Jakarta Bureau Chief 1995-2005 and lead investigative reporter for Asia.
During that time, she reported on critical events and interviewed heads of state from many different countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, India, Malaysia and the Philippines.
In 2004, she reported on crucial elections in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, tying their impact to the region and the global war on terror. Investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia was a long-time focus for her. She also headed the news division of ABS-CBN, the largest media conglomerate in the Philippines, while still writing for CNN and The Wall Street Journal.
In 2012, Ressa and three other female journalists started Rappler. They were set to break even in 2016 but targeted harassment decimated their numbers, credibility and readership.
“I often tell people that what happened to me, and what happened to Rappler, is an early-warning system for the rest of the world,” Ressa writes in an excerpt of her new book published in The Atlantic.
“Maria’s struggle is one that defines our times,” wrote her lawyer, Amal Clooney, in a piece for The Guardian.
Rappler reached out to Facebook for help curbing the harassment. Despite Facebook’s strong hold on the Phillipines and its institutions, their pleas were ignored because the outlet was outside the U.S. In 2017, 97 percent of Filipinos were on Facebook, according to Ressa.
“The Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace,” Ressa says in an excerpt of her book published in The Guardian. “Every development that happens in my country eventually happens in the rest of the world – if not tomorrow, then a year or two later.”
Ressa will speak during the Social Justice lecture of the New Albany Lecture Series on Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts.
“I think it’s always wonderful to have a former Nobel Prize winner,” Craig Mohre, president of the New Albany Community Foundation, says. “I watched her acceptance speech in Oslo and it was very powerful. I think people are going to find her program very insightful and inspiring.”
Her program will be the first lecture in 2023 of the 10th anniversary season of the New Albany Lecture Series.
“If you look around the world, a free and open media is not common in all of the world and certainly in other countries right now,” Mohre says. “In fact, I think a lot of the free press is under assault around the world. And I think her message about the importance that free media
plays in democracy is timely and important.”
Beyond the Nobel Peace Prize, Ressa has earned many awards and honors for her work including being named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year and one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She’s received numerous journalistic awards including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
Her story and struggle to report on disinformation, Duterte’s presidency and the subversive power of social media is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary A Thousand Cuts.
She’s leading the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which finds solutions for drops in advertising revenues of news organizations.
The Filipino government has brought 23 cases against Ressa and Rappler since 2018. Ressa plans to appeal her current case in the Supreme Court of the Phillipines. She faces a six-year sentence if convicted.
“Looking back today, I can see what I missed at the time,” Ressa writes in an excerpt of her new book published in The Atlantic. “In my case, dangerous individuals seeded the narrative that would unravel democracy. Propagandists across the web chanted ‘Journalist equals criminal’ and ‘Arrest Maria Ressa’ years before my first arrest; in doing so, they softened public acceptance for legal cases that later became a reality. Let me say this to you as clearly as I possibly can: This happened to me. It can happen to you.”
Reads by Ressa
Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center (2003)
During her time at CNN, Ressa broke story after story about al-Qaeda’s ties to Southeast Asia, with every major attack from the group since 1993 having a link to the Philippines. She reports on the little-known post-9/11 generation of al-Qaeda planning and training grounds in the Philippines and Indonesia.
From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism (2013)
Terrorism’s new battleground is on the internet and social media. Ressa follows the spread of terrorism and terrorist networks on and off the web over a decade.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)
Ressa tells her own story of how tracking disinformation from her own government made her a target of the country’s most powerful man, now former President Rodrigo Duterte. Fighting for her life with multiple arrest warrants against her, Ressa speaks on how democracy dies gradually through small action after action if we’re not paying attention.
But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte.
10 Years of Lectures
The New Albany Community Foundation has presented over 60 speakers through the New Albany Lecture Series.
More than 27,000 students representing over 50 central Ohio high schools have participated in the foundation’s student lectures, and over 45,000 community members have attended its evening lectures.
Through benchmarking by The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and the New Albany Community Foundation, The New Albany Lecture Series is believed to be among the best in the country.
Coming up in the 10th anniversary season
Feb. 16 – History
Bret Baier
March 8 – Civil Discourse and Debate
Dr. Arthur Laffer
Robert Reich
Moderated by Rana Foroohar
June 6 – National Security
General John F. Kelly
Adm. James Stavridis
Moderated by Jim Sciutto
Claire Miller is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com.
