Front Burner - Maria Ressa on her conviction, press freedom and Duterte

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

On June 15, Maria Ressa, along with a former colleague of her news organization, Rappler, were convicted of ‘cyber libel’ in the Philippines. This, along with seven other charges, are widely seen as an encroachment on press freedom in the country by President Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian government. Today on Front Burner, a conversation with Maria Ressa on why she continues to pursue her journalistic work, despite possible jail time and the threats on her life.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Josh Bloch. When you're a respected reporter, you have people who can see your work. But this is a different time. Whole families have come to me in airports to hug me.

And they just say, you know, you are saying things we want to say, but we can't. Maria Ressa is the kind of journalist that a lot of journalists look up to for her relentless pursuit of truth. And she's the loudest voice, you know, speaking out against Duterte in the Philippines right now. Her fight against fake news and online abuse has come to symbolize the growing battle worldwide to defend media freedom. Since 2012, she's been at the helm of a news website called Rappler. The publication is well known for investigating government corruption and the war on drugs in the Philippines, which has left thousands dead. As a result, Maria Ressa has a lot of critics at the highest levels of power in her country.

You are the spies, Duterte told the reporters. Duterte said, just because you're a journalist, you are not exempt from assassination. Rodrigo Duterte, the authoritarian president of the Philippines, is known for trying to take power away from the free press. Reporters like Maria Ressa, who scrutinizes regime, are a constant target. Duterte's government has launched legal cases against Ressa for crimes like tax fraud and illegal foreign ownership. And on June 15th, The morning starts out light for journalists Maria Ressa and Ray Santos Jr.

As if they're not about to be read a verdict that can send them to jail. Ressa, along with a former Rappler reporter, were found guilty of cyber libel. But despite that, she's remained even more determined to fight for press freedoms in the Philippines. Today, our conversation with Maria Ressa. This is FrontBurger. Great. Hi, Maria. It's Josh. Hi, Josh. Thank you for joining us.

As soon as I started talking to Maria, it was clear that she isn't the kind of person who gets distracted from her work easily. Not even when she's facing a conviction that could result in jail time. I went back to work the day I got the conviction. I started off by asking her about the eight criminal charges that she faces. Charges that human rights groups, and even the U.S. Senate say are unjustified. International Center for Journalists, or ICFJ, calls June 15 a devastating day for journalism. And the verdict, a miscarriage of justice. It certainly sends a chilling effect on the media community here.

And what it is about her stories that has drawn so much anger from President Duterte. We challenge impunity. You know, you mentioned it the first time. The first is a series we call the impunity series. Rappler is in the sights of Rodrigo Duterte's government for its persistent reporting of Duterte's bloody drug war in which human rights groups describe thousands of police killings as summary executions. That focuses on this brutal drug war in which human rights groups describe thousands of police killings as summary executions.

That focuses on this brutal drug war and you know the death toll goes up as high as 27,000 several months ago. That's from our the Philippine Commission on Human Rights. And then we also challenged impunity in a propaganda war, in the propaganda war, the use of social media. Online disinformation networks pushing pro-government messages. Facebook in particular in the Philippines, because that's an American company. So aside from that, we continue, despite the government's efforts to harass, to intimidate us, we continue moving forward doing hard-hitting reporting.

And of course, Duterte has denied that this cyber libel case is at all politically motivated. What do you make of that? Yeah, I laugh now. You know, I mean, the only thing I can do is laugh, really, because you talked about eight arrest warrants, right? Those are the eight criminal charges that I received in 2019. But the year before that, in 2018, the government essentially filed 11 cases and investigations that was whittled down to eight criminal charges. But you know, I've been a journalist by next year, I would have been a journalist for 35 years. And the slew of cases, these types of attacks that we're going through now, really are, you just have to look at the context of every single charge. This particular one, the cyber libel, was the most laughable of all of them, but also the first one that I was arrested for. In order to actually get this case

to court, just to get it to court, because it was already thrown out by the government's own lawyers. And then a few weeks later, miraculously, it was picked up by the Department of Justice and filed. But, you know, they had to change the statute of limitations on libel from one year to 12 years. That will have an impact on every Filipino. These legal acrobatics is not just in this case. On the tax evasion cases, and there were a slew of them, they were filed against us just months after we received an award from the tax agency for being a top corporate taxpayer. So track record doesn't mean anything. You're supposed to forget all of that. And in order to file tax evasion charges against us, they essentially classified us as, and this is a

direct quote from the case, a dealer in securities. We're certainly not a dealer in securities. We're a news group. Well, you were quoted after the verdict came down as saying, quote, freedom of the press is the foundation of every single right. Every single right you have as a Filipino citizen. If we can't hold power to account, we can't do anything. What would you say is the through line in your journalism? Like, what are you always trying to accomplish in your work uh we hold power to account right because no matter what no matter how kind someone is when they get power somehow that adage absolute power corrupts absolutely their checks and balances built into our democracies precisely

for that reason and the fourth estate's job is that right but think beyond that, it's a sense of justice. I think that's why we're journalists, right? But what I'm seeing now, though, is that in a strange way, it's good that the government attacked me when I'm old. I mean, Josh, I'm old, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. And in a way, it feels like my entire career is my training. It's like I went to the gym. I've been working really hard at that. And I know who I am. I to intimidate us isn't situational. We're not going with situational ethics. We know who we are and why we do what we do. That's part of why we created Rappler in the first place. And so it's very easy to think for the long haul. It's been years, as you say, of this antagonism between the government and your work. I want to step back for a moment and just look at how it began in terms of your relationship and reporting on Duterte.

When did you first hear about him? I mean, we've known each other for a very long time or known of each other. When he was contemplating about running for president, I was in Davao City and I interviewed him in October of 2015. As you were running after criminals or you're also talking peace with the rebels. Yes, because the two different things, one is for pocket and the other one is ideology. And the first thing he told me was he remembered an interview I did with him in the late 80s when I was still with CNN. And I was with CNN for almost 20 years. For many, many years, I was the face of CNN in the countries I covered in Southeast Asia. And he remembered me from that.

I knew him from the time when I did those stories. I knew his reputation. The interview we did in October 2015 was refreshing to me, but shocking at the same time because he told me on camera that he killed three people. So no qualms about killing killers? Yes, of course. I must admit that I have killed.

Three months early on, I killed about three people. Just like that. And I nodded my head, you know, and I asked him. I mean, that was refreshing at that point in time. And then I guess I was one of four reporters he gave an interview to in December of 2016. That was when he had already started the drug war. My campaign against drug will not stop until the last pusher and the last drug lord are killed. He came to our interview with a large sheaf of papers, like it was almost 12 inches thick, right?

And I asked him why, what goes into his style of leadership, because he was now president of the country. And he's, I asked him whether he needed, he needed to have to use violence and fear. And he said, absolutely, because he felt that Filipinos needed discipline and they react to fear. 30 new patients a day. And are they telling you why they're coming? Most of them are here because of fear. Fear. Fear. What's going on outside the government's actions, especially the PNP and the police, the crackdown, has made them fear that they might be either incarcerated or worse, even killed.

So this is part of his leadership style. And in fact, in that first month that he was in power, more than 300 people were reported killed. That sounds about right. I think, you know, we have one night beat reporter. And during that time period from a few hours after he took his oath of office, the end of June, she was coming back with at least eight dead bodies a night, you know, dumped on the sidewalk, mouth gagged, a sign saying, don't follow me, I'm a drug pusher. And then later, the human rights groups pointed out that it was an average of about 33 people killed every night during that time period.

On the streets, his bloody prediction has come true. Since the election in May, the number of drug suspects killed by police has doubled. Share cars, watch each other's backs. You okay? They have to. Because the murders keep happening. And to what extent has that continued on to this day?

One of the first casualties in the battle for truth is the number of people killed in the drug war. And when that was how we first earned the ire of President Duterte, because we took the numbers that the government was reporting and just held them to it. And what they did is they began parsing it, right, atomizing it to meaninglessness, coming up with new acronyms. First, it was, you know, deaths under investigation. Real numbers are suddenly hard to come by. Newspapers that once diligently tracked the deaths don't seem to anymore. And official updates on cases are rare. Is it still going on today? Absolutely. But it is much harder to report on it,

especially since we're now, like many countries around the world, in a lockdown for coronavirus. And it's a lockdown that's been largely led by security forces. You know, President Duterte is pretty much true to form. On April 1, he told Filipinos, stay at home because you're not going to like what I'm going to do. And then he told the police, and this is a direct quote, he said, if people violate quarantine, he said, his direct quote is, shoot them dead. Shoot them dead. We are ready for you. I will not hesitate. My soldiers to shoot you.

I will not hesitate to order the police to arrest and detain you. Angel Investment and Industry Connections. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. has been around disinformation online. And in 2016, Rappler started looking at how Facebook was being used in the Philippines, which has 47 million users at that time. And it led to identifying a number of fake accounts where the purpose would be to form what you call patriotic trolling. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for asking. We challenged impunity on two fronts, the Duterte administration, and then the second front is actually an American social media platform, Facebook, and the weaponization of the internet that had happened once the drug war began. a first-hand look. So I have both a micro and a macro look at how disinformation works. Think about it like this. In 2016, the disinformation networks seeded the idea that

journalist equals criminal. Journalist equals criminal and repeated it a million times during that time period, like fertilizer. And then in 2017, the same words, journalistic, post-criminal, comes out of President Duterte's mouth when he attacks Rappler. Rappler is on the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte's, bad side. You are a fake news outlet. In the Philippines, those words carry dangerous weight. Duterte tried to close Rappler. A week later, I get the first subpoena.

And in 2018, I get 11 cases and investigations. And you actually named them. They're broadly three buckets. Cyber libel, tax evasion, and securities fraud. I mean, I was shocked at that time period. But I went through the process that in 2019, I'm given eight arrest warrants for criminal violations and arrested twice in a five-week period. I felt this also firsthand after we did the Propaganda War series. I was pummeled with an average of 90 hate messages per hour. And that kind of

exponential attacks, they're meant to do two things, pound you to silence. So that's this is the first form of intimidation that we felt. And then the second one is it actually creates a fake bandwagon effect. It's like a manufactured consensus so that it makes others believe that journalists equals criminals. It makes others believe whatever narrative the propaganda network wants to do. The attacks got worse, not just on Ressa, but all Filipino journalists who dared try to hold Duterte to account. Have you been threatened with violence? Yes. Have you been threatened with death? Yes. Has the violence been described to you? Yeah, blow my head off. This is happening not just in the Philippines. It's happening in every country around the world where the primary distribution of news is social media. And that's

basically all of us. This is the problem with the way social media operates. This is democracy death by a thousand cuts. It begins here. And it actually goes with why we became journalists in the first place, right? Information is power. And when you can't tell lies from facts, when facts are debatable, that's the beginning of the end of democracy. You know, so much of your work is indelibly tied to the Philippines, which is where you grew up, but you also grew up in the United States where you studied at Princeton, you won a Fulbright Fellowship to study political theater in Manoa. I'm curious, what made you decide to stay in the Philippines for the long run, as opposed to doing some more kind of work in the United States?

I think, you know, when you come from more than one culture, it's hard to choose home. I, I went to school in the States, and I never felt completely American. And then once I got the Fulbright to come back to the Philippines, it was 1986. And when I got back here, I realized how American I was and how not Filipino I was, right? I wanted to find out what being Filipino meant. And I, and I bounced back and forth. When I started working for CNN, being Filipino meant. And I bounced back and forth. When I started working for CNN, it was 1986. And I tried to figure out where home was. And then I gave myself a deadline.

I set up the Manila Bureau. And then in 1995, I set up the Jakarta Bureaus of CNN. And I said, by the time I turn 40, I'm going to choose home. And I said, by the time I turned 40, I'm going to choose home. I chose the Philippines because I felt like it was a society, it was a democracy. It was still putting itself together. The institutions were so weak and it was coming out. People power gave it the ability to try to create institutions. But think about it like the Philippines is patterned after the United States in the sense of our

constitution is patterned after the United States. And we were looking for identity. And that was kind of, that was interesting to me. When I left CNN, I thought I was old enough to have real experience. It was almost 20 years with CNN, and yet young enough to still want to make a difference. And that this country, the Philippines made me feel like that, like, I could help make a difference here. Oh, my Lord, little did I know I would help make a difference, but maybe going to jail, you know, this is crazy. So it's a long-winded answer. I think part of it was as a journalist, I grew up in Southeast Asia. And I love the sensibilities of Southeast Asia.

I think there are a lot of American journalists and they're outspoken. I think there are very few Southeast Asian journalists like me who can bridge to the West, because I am of both worlds. And now that skills come very handy for me, right? I mean, you're interested in what we're going through here, and that's partly because I can describe it to you in ways that are familiar. I want to end like this. There's a lot of uncertainty right now with your appeal. It's possible that you could get jail time. And knowing how your government behaves, how do you manage your fear around what your future

might hold? You know, I gave the commencement speech to the class of 2020 at Princeton University, and I gave them advice. And one of the advice I gave is something I learned when I was really young. You know, when you're a Filipino, a short, scrawny kid showing up in the New Jersey public school, and you're the shortest kid in the class. I hid the first year or so until I realized that we are our own worst enemies, that our fears prevent us from being our best selves. The advice is simple. It's embrace your fear. Imagine what you're most afraid of, touch it and hold it so that you rob it of its power. And whatever it is, it took me about a month to like touch being afraid of going to jail, to embrace it, to really imagine it so that I could rob it

of its sting. Because you can't be, I can't do what I need to do if I'm afraid. And the only way to do that is to imagine it and be prepared for it. So embrace your fear. That's kind of what I've done now. And I think the reason why we have to do that in Rappler is because we don't know where this will take us. And if it was just me, right, if I'm just fighting for Maria Ressa, then, you know, gosh, I'll just stay quiet. I mean, I'm a quiet person generally. But it's not. It's not about me. It's not about Rappler.

It's not even just about the Philippines. This is a really unique moment for all of democracies around the world. And I feel like if we don't ring the alarm, then we will lose our democracies without us even knowing it. In my case, it's important that Filipinos decide what kind of government they want, what kind of system. what kind of government they want, what kind of system. Do they still want a democracy? Because if they don't, then gosh, let's just change it already, right? Let's not pretend to be a democracy. But what's happening in the Philippines is also happening in other parts of the world. The disinformation networks are changing us. And we're going to need to choose what we want our future to be. Well, I'm in a huge amount of awe in terms of the work that you're doing and the way that you have stood up for freedom of press and for democracy.

So thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thanks for having me, Josh. So you just heard Maria talk about the investigations she's done on Facebook and the spread of disinformation and how it can promote hate. That issue is getting a lot of attention from North American companies right now. Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Lululemon are just a few of the businesses pulling their Facebook advertisements for July

as part of a boycott called Stop Hate for Profit. The campaign, which was started by civil rights organizations, demands the social media company do more to keep racist and dangerous content off their platforms. In response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will change its policies to hide or block hate. Despite this, the boycott isn't letting up. We're going to have more on this story in the coming days, but that's all for now. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.