The Journalist vs. the President, With Life on the Line
"Philippine Supreme Court Orders Release of Documents in Duterte’s Drug War "Philippine Leader, Focused on War on Drug Users, Ignored Rise of ISIS "Philippines President Duterte Says His Soldiers Can Rape During Martial Law"""
Yet another story of courageous journalists in a country with an ultra-authoritarian leader who labels the free press as 'the enemy'.
Maria Ressa, editor of a popular news site in the Philippines, has incurred President Duterte and his supporters’ wrath by investigating his extrajudicial killing campaign.
By Joshua Hammer
Published Oct. 15, 2019 Updated Oct. 18, 2019
Early in the afternoon of May 7, Maria Ressa sat before a couple of hundred people in the lobby of Palma Hall, the dilapidated social-sciences and philosophy building at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, just north of Manila. The attendees, many of them students, had packed themselves shoulder to shoulder on yellow chairs; hand-held fans stirred the torpid air as a drizzle fell on the palm trees in the courtyard. It was six days before the Philippines’ midterm elections, and the country’s usual mix of soap-opera politics and melodramatic conspiracy theories had reached a new intensity.
Two weeks earlier, The Manila Times [as expected rated center-right - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-manila-times/ ], the country’s oldest English-language newspaper, published a list of writers, editors and lawyers who, the paper asserted, were plotting a coup against President Rodrigo Duterte. The newspaper called it the “Matrix” and placed Ressa — CNN’s former Southeast Asia bureau chief and the editor of an online news site called Rappler .. https://www.rappler.com/ — near the center of the plot. The Matrix, the paper argued, planned to “manipulate public emotion” with fake news, establish contact with a “Leftist organization,” enlist cells in the police and the military, “then go for the ‘kill’?” — an expression presumably meant to be taken literally. The day the article appeared, Salvador Panelo, Duterte’s spokesman, brandished a diagram of the Matrix that, he claimed, had been delivered to Duterte by a foreign intelligence agency. “They are all,” Panelo declared, “trying to destroy this government by spreading false news and planting intrigues.” He later added, “The president does not lie about these things.”
Since it went live in January 2012, Rappler has become one of the country’s most popular and influential media platforms, mixing reporting with calls for social activism. Today the site attracts an average of 40 million page views and 12 million unique visitors a month, figures that more than double during the Philippines’ election season. Rappler’s reporters, most of whom are in their 20s, have exposed government corruption and researched the financial holdings and potential conflicts of interest of top political figures.
They have been especially critical of Duterte, investigating his extrajudicial killing campaign against people suspected of dealing or using drugs, documenting the spread of government disinformation on Facebook and reporting on malfeasance among his top advisers. As a result, the site has incurred Duterte’s wrath and been targeted by his loyalists; Ressa has been forced to increase her personal security. The accusations in The Manila Times, propagated by Dante Ang, the paper’s owner and publisher and a fierce Duterte supporter, were part of the latest and perhaps most theatrical attempt to put Rappler out of business and discredit Ressa and possibly send her to jail; three months later, she would go on trial in six separate courtrooms in Metro Manila and face the frightening prospect of spending decades in prison.
The rhetoric aimed at Ressa is eerily familiar to American ears. President Trump castigates the news media as the “enemy of the people” and “fake news” and has encouraged violence against reporters, whom he has called “scum.” Duterte refers to journalists as “spies,” “vultures” and “lowlifes.” His wish, he has said, is to “kill journalism” in the Philippines, and he has asserted that “just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch.” Duterte threatened to open a tax case against the owners of The Philippine Daily Inquirer, a newspaper in Metro Manila that has questioned his war on drugs, and said he might block the franchise renewal of ABS-CBN, the Philippines’ largest media-and-entertainment conglomerate. Trump accused Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, a frequently critical news outlet, of shirking taxes and suggested that he might use his presidential powers to check the e-commerce giant. When I asked Panelo whether he thought that his boss, who has used the term “fake news” to describe Rappler, had appropriated Trump’s language and style, he laughed and said, “President Trump is copying us now.”
[... to the end of an interesting read ...]
Duterte’s political alliance won all 12 contested seats .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/world/asia/philippines-election-results.html .. in the Senate, handing the president complete control over the three branches of government. When I spoke to Ressa by phone two weeks later, she had just returned to Manila from New York, where she gave the commencement speech at Columbia Journalism School’s graduation ceremony, and had plunged back into the fray, building a new Rappler online platform, speaking before representatives of 12 countries at an inquiry on “big data, privacy and democracy” hosted by the Canadian House of Commons and shuttling between appearances in two Manila courthouses and a mediation meeting with lawyers on the cyberlibel case. Ressa told me that Duterte’s electoral sweep was not necessarily dire news. The consolidation could mean, she said, “that we can do our work. After all, what does he have to fear?”
But a moment later, she despaired at the possibility that a new Constitution could “formalize our democracy’s descent into tyranny and swing the pendulum that began in 1986 back to authoritarian rule.” Ressa and her attorneys have filed a blizzard of appeals to block the closure order from the P.S.E.C. and keep her and the board out of prison. But the courts are stacked with Duterte appointees; the chances of a victory are slim.
Ressa had been talking to her lawyers about protections that might be afforded to her under international law in the event she is imprisoned. On July 23, Ressa’s criminal trial for cyberlibel began in Manila, and soon after that, she was back in court to face the tax-evasion and “anti-dummy” charges. She hired an international legal team, including the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, to represent her and, throughout the summer and fall, was spending up to four days a week in front of judges at four different trials around Metro Manila; a verdict in the cyberlibel case was expected late this year. If convicted on all counts, Ressa faces a cumulative sentence of just over 63 years in prison. “We’ve developed a gallows humor about it,” Ressa told me; she had talked about the prospect of prison with the three other founders of Rappler. “One of them said she would bring me a fan. Another, bedsheets. Another, food. At the beginning it’s scary, but the more you talk about it, you rob it of its sting. You embrace the fear.”
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
