A Nobel Peace Prize Winner on the State of Press Freedom and Democracy

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We will start with a special edition for the first half of the show today. Last night in WNYC's theater, The Green Space, I hosted an episode of the WNYC series Democracy Dialogues. Our special guest was the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa, who has a new book called The Fight Back, A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. Maria Ressa was the first journalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize since the 1930s. Her central premise is that the world is facing an explosion of two kinds of authoritarianism, human head of state authoritarians, I'm sure you can think of some, and the authoritarianism of the tech companies that control what versions of reality we see. It's not every day we get to connect with a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and considering the authoritarianism that's on the rise in the world today, and the pressure on free speech and journalism in particular, this was very much of a high stakes moment, and since this green space event was not live on the radio station last night, we thought you'd like to hear much of it this morning. So we will start with this today, and do the second half of the show live like any other Friday. So here we go with 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa, in a WNYC Democracy Dialogue. We'll pick it up as I welcome her to the green space stage.

Maria, thank you so much for your work and for giving this, giving this hour to us for a Democracy Dialogue. Welcome.

Maria Ressa (1:45)

No, I mean, thank you. Thank you for.

Brian Lehrer (1:52)

So would you start with a little of your own story for people unfamiliar with you? You name the two dictators in your defining professional story from a decade or so ago, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who by the way, is scheduled to stand trial next month at the International Criminal Court. I think that just got confirmed for Crimes Against Humanity.

So Duterte and Mark Zuckerberg. So my first question is, why pair Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of a tech company concerned presumably with making money, with Duterte, an alleged monster of an authoritarian and authoritarian war criminal?

Maria Ressa (2:38)

Look, for us in the Philippines and Rappler in particular, we, it's been a decade, it's been a decade of this. And when I believed in the technology, Rappler was built first on Facebook and when it was weaponized. So coming up first, and many of you are living through this now, bottom up social media attacks, information operations is what we first began to call it. But it changes the design of the platform. Literally, if it is alive, it spreads at least six times faster. That's a 2018 MIT study. And then you lace it with fear, anger and hate. It goes viral. In the Philippines, the attacks against women were 10 times more than men. So we had the data. And then that was followed. The bottom-up attacks were followed top-down by lawfare, the kinds of legal cases. Rappler had 27 investigations. You know, we were a company of about 100 people.

And all of a sudden, I had to get a chief legal officer. I didn't have a chief legal officer.

10 cases against Rappler criminal, 11 cases against me.

Since then, in about a decade, Rappler has won all those cases, and I still have one left. So be careful the rights that you lose, because you have, it takes a long time to claw them back. Sorry, this is my story, right? I survived. Rappler survived. Here you are. Here I am with permission from the Philippine Supreme Court. Thank you. Every single time I leave the Philippines, I have to ask for permission. I've been a journalist for a long time. Forty years, 1986 was when I began, when people power happened in the Philippines, and I spent the beginning of my career literally covering countries in Southeast Asia that were moving from authoritarian one-man rule to democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote that, that, right? That the end of history, and then now at the tail end of my career, I feel like the pendulum is swinging the other way, and that is because it's tech-enabled. Sorry, to answer your question briefly now, Rodrigo Duterte crushed our institutions, became the most powerful leader the Philippines has ever had. He was a dictator. He was in power for six years. But the bigger dictator, and you'll see this in both how to stand up to a dictator and the fight back, is actually Mark Zuckerberg because while Duterte is now detained at the Hague, November 30th begins his trial for crimes against humanity. We have systems of accountability for that. But for the technology that rules our lives, we have none.