"Wearing a bulletproof vest, how can you not be afraid?" Exclusive interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa

Joint interview/Written by Zhou Huiyi and Li Muyi/Zhou Huiyi

"How far are we willing to sacrifice for the truth?"

In 2017, the international community began to focus on the Philippine independent media "Rappler" and its co-founder Maria Ressa (Chinese translation: Maria Ressa) because they had the courage to expose the drug war and information launched by the then Duterte administration. war, and tenaciously withstood Duterte’s wave of political attacks.

At that time, attention from all over the world created a protective shield for them, but more and more attacks followed. In 2018, the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled to revoke the business license of “Rappler”; in the same year, Ressa was charged with several tax evasion charges and an arrest warrant was issued. But that year, she became TIME's Person of the Year, and it was also that year that she began to wear a bulletproof vest while traveling by car in the capital Manila, and was followed by security personnel.

Ressa described 2018 as a year of anger, fear and hatred. But the story isn't over yet.

▌Exclusive interview with Maria Ressa Podcast, please listen to the link

In 2019, she was arrested for the first time; in 2020, the court found her guilty of online defamation; in 2021, she and a Russian journalist jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize; in 2022, Marcos Jr., the son of the Philippine dictator, used information to Zhan was elected with a high vote, and "Rappler" was ordered to close; in 2023, the court issued a not guilty verdict on her tax evasion charges - in the past few years, good things and bad things have always intersected, testing her, but also giving her Many hopes.

To this day, Ressa still wears a bulletproof vest when traveling by car in Manila. What does a reporter wearing a bulletproof vest usually think about while on the road? In this regard, Ressa said lightly but seriously: Always trying to stay vigilant.

She noted, "I never want it to affect my work. Everyone always asks me, why aren't you scared? I don't think I'm scared because I assess the risk and I accept the risk. If you do , then you take the appropriate steps to mitigate the risk, and then you can move on. It’s kind of interesting.”

A few decades ago, perhaps no one would have thought that a petite, introverted, and shy little girl could possess such great perseverance.

Ressa was born in 1963; her father died when she was less than a year old. After that, her mother moved to the United States , while she and her sister stayed in Manila to live with their grandmother. In 1973, ten-year-old Ressa was taken away from school by her mother without warning in the middle of class one day. She moved to New Jersey, USA, away from her grandmother. When she first arrived in the United States and became an immigrant, she did not adapt well and she did not speak English well. Looking back, Ressa said her teacher told her that she had nothing to say for almost a year.

However, she worked hard to integrate. She practiced English, played piano, violin, basketball, and chess. She tried to get the best results in each subject to prove that she could have a place. Ultimately, she applied to 13 colleges and chose to attend Princeton University.

During those ten years, when Ressa was concentrating on adapting to life in the United States, the Philippines she left had undergone earth-shaking changes.

A year before Ressa left the Philippines, then-President Ferdinand. Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law across the country on September 21, 1972. This period of martial law lasted for nine years. During this period, the Marcos government suppressed countless dissidents, suppressed press freedom, abolished presidential term limits, and combined executive and legislative powers. Although Marcos later announced the lifting of martial law, years of oppression and anger had brewed in society. Especially in 1983, opposition leader Ninoy Aquino was shot and killed as he stepped out of the airport tarmac, triggering millions of people to take to the streets. Mourning and protest.

Therefore, in order to legitimate his rule, Marcos held an early election in 1986, and Aquino's wife Corazon Aquino announced her candidacy. However, due to various chaotic situations during the election process, including suspected fraud, vote-buying, and the defection of the military, the Philippines eventually broke out in the four-day " People Power Revolution " (EDSA), ending Marco Marcos's tenure. After 22 years of dictatorship, Cora Rong became Asia's first female president.

Also in the same year, Ressa graduated from college. She wrote a play about a grandmother, who symbolizes Marcos, and another mother, who symbolizes Coralone, who compete with each other for custody of their child, who is the Philippines. It was her way of exploring herself, her family, and the Philippines, "The personal is political and the political is personal. ... When you talk to Filipino families, when you're a kid, you never get the whole story, right? Because You have to respect your elders. So writing the script was a way for my mother to tell me what happened."

She laughed and said, isn’t it also her story about a grandmother and a mother fighting for custody in the Philippines? "Look, I am the Filipino." After graduation, she returned to the Philippines to find her grandma and her own home. When she arrived in the Philippines, she remembered that she could still feel the joy of the People Power Revolution and thought that the future of the Philippines would be incredible.

▌What if "crisis" is a gift from God to journalists?

At first, Ressa worked at the Philippine TV station PTV4, and later joined the team of the news documentary program "Probe". Then she served as a reporter for "CNN", going deep into disaster areas and war zones, and she was busy burning the candle at both ends. But during this period, she quickly accumulated solid reporting experience and developed both local and global perspectives.

“But it’s not just about gaining experience,” she writes in her new book , “Say No to Dictators.” “If there’s anything that has shaped my personality—or my ability to withstand threats—it’s definitely It was because I became a reporter covering breaking news on television that I learned to be calm on the air, sometimes even in the middle of a firefight. That became my superpower."

For example, the East Timor crisis.

In 1999, East Timor held an independence referendum. Nearly 80% of the people supported East Timor's independence from Indonesia. As a result, the anti-independence forces supported by Indonesia launched an armed uprising. As the editor-in-chief of CNN's Manila and Jakarta bureaus, Ressa took her team to East Timor to report. However, unlike other teams of reporters who stayed in hotels, Ressa took the reporters to stay in the local community. This made CNN the last international news team to evacuate when the riots and shootings occurred - when the hotel's reporter team evacuated one after another. Ressa noted that the day before the evacuation, they hid under the bed with the lights off for an entire night until sunrise before escaping to the airport.

“What I’ve learned from reporting in war zones is that fear can erode mental clarity. So here’s a tip for those who go to war: Go into the trenches with someone you trust, and if things go bad, control fear with hope. "

Journalists cannot predict crises, but they can control how they respond to crises and their emotions. Ressa has a set of procedures for dealing with this: suppress emotions and stay calm.

She left "CNN" in 2005 and joined ABS-CBN , the largest television station in the Philippines. In addition to her hopes for reform of the journalism industry, she was greeted by a greater crisis. After Ressa arrived, she carried out drastic reforms. She downsized, established new institutional principles and company culture, and worked hard to build a station that could compete with the world's top news organizations, winning many awards.

However, a few years later, she encountered the most difficult crisis at the time that she hoped she would never experience again in her life: she received a call that the Islamic terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines had kidnapped three of her colleagues. , and she was not allowed to notify the government and the military.

This means that every decision made by Ressa will affect the life or death of her colleagues. If it is not handled properly or refuses to negotiate, Abu Sayyaf once decapitated a hostage.

Years of experience in reporting in war zones made her realize immediately that the first few hours after a kidnapping are crucial, otherwise other kidnappers with better equipment and larger scale may intervene and want to take a piece of the pie. If time passes, The longer it goes on, the more militants may get involved. Therefore, after putting down the phone, she quickly listed all the things to be dealt with immediately: contact all important informants on hand to understand the situation and devise solutions as much as possible; contact the family members of her colleagues and explain all decisions to their families; comfort her colleagues , let the work of the TV station continue to operate, etc.

Although she was scared during the process, she was also confident. She revealed her feelings at that time for the first time in her book "From Bin Laden to Facebook: Ten Days of Kidnapping and Ten Years of Terrorism". She described: "I felt very confident. , because my entire career seems to have prepared me for this. I know what it feels like to be in a life or death situation - half scared, half excited. In order to make the right choices, you have to think clearly so you can think faster and reactions, you can do that by draining emotions. It's an incredible state to be in, and I think that's why people get addicted to working in war zones. (Somehow, I realized, This is easier when you risk your own safety — and harder when you risk the safety of others).”

In the end, it took Ressa and the team ten days to successfully rescue their colleague.

This crisis allowed her to establish a deep friendship with several female comrades, laying the foundation for co-founding "Rappler" in 2012, as well as her ability to handle various larger and more crises during the Duterte administration. .

▌Is it really possible to "embrace fear"?

There are four founders of "Rappler". Everyone calls them "manangs", which means big sister, but those who hate them call them witches. In the early days of its establishment, "Rappler" was good at using the advantages of social platforms to create connections between communities, bringing readers from the virtual world to the real world, participating in public activities, and driving social change. For example, one of the campaigns they launched , #ProjectAgos, is in response to the problem of natural disasters in the Philippines: whenever a disaster occurs, people can quickly mobilize disaster relief through the prepared warning maps. At that time, the power of the news industry combined with technology and social platforms such as Facebook made Ressa excited and believed that "the level of participation in the world has become deeper."

The reason why social platforms can play a key role in the Philippines is inseparable from their high usage rate. In 2017, 97% of Filipinos used Facebook; in 2021, Filipinos have become the group of people who spend the most time on the Internet and social media for six consecutive years-perhaps it is this phenomenon that made "Rappler" It can mobilize forces and promote positive change, but ironically, it also allows dictators such as Duterte and even Marcos, who later came to power, to create narratives that are favorable to themselves and tear society apart.

Before Duterte took office in June 2016, the "Rappler" team discovered that a large number of pro-Duterte Facebook accounts were spreading fear and violence. Even after taking office, the accounts of Duterte and his large number of supporters continued to spread lies and disinformation on Facebook, rationalizing his controversial drug war. As a platform, Facebook has yet to take action to stop it.

Ressa and her team wrote a series of reports for this purpose in October of the same year, talking about the weaponization of the Internet, how Facebook's algorithms impact democracy, and how fake accounts on Facebook create reality. As a result, after the publication of this series of reports, "Rappler" disappeared 20,000 followers overnight due to the campaign launched by pro-Duterte accounts. Ressa received an average of 90 hateful messages against her an hour, full of violence, disgust and disgust. Online attacks on women, including death threats, are coming like an overwhelming force.

"I smell Rappler and Maria Ressa being arrested and possibly shut down."

"Maybe Maria Ressa's dream is to be the ultimate porn star in a gangbang scene. She's desperate to get laid."

"I hope Maria Ressa was repeatedly raped to death. If that happens when martial law is declared, I will be happy. It will bring joy to my heart."

Since then, she and "Rappler" have been charged with various crimes, including tax evasion, online defamation, and control by foreign investors. The charges against Ressa could add up to a hundred years in prison - which has also focused the world's attention on this fighter against Duterte. She said calmly,

"I think Duterte may have forgotten that I cover breaking news for CNN, I work in war zones, in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and I am okay with that."

By 2018, Ressa pointed out that their security manpower increased sixfold, and she also started wearing a bulletproof vest this year, "Because you don't know what will happen next, so you have to be ready for everything. ..when so much violence is unleashed [online], it means that any random person can attack. ...You know, when these Duterte supporters come to our company and freak out Our employees, we have to protect ourselves. But you can't be so paranoid that you can't do your job."

In Ressa's public speeches, she often tells everyone to prepare for the worst-case scenario and "embrace fear": no matter what you are most afraid of, hold it, touch it, take away its thorn, and then continue to fear. Go forward.

However, the fear and killings brought about by Duterte during his six years in office are real and bloody. Every night, the bodies of people killed by the drug war lie on the roadside. Human rights organizations estimate that the number of victims is as high as 27,000 to 30,000. During this period, at least 61 lawyers were killed ; according to the Association for the Protection of Journalists , a total of 24 journalists or media workers were killed, mostly due to murder; in addition, locally, female journalists were ten times more likely to be attacked than men.

So, is it really possible to embrace fear? How "bad" would the worst plan be? In jail or in exile? In fact, Ressa has dual citizenship in the United States and the Philippines, but the reason she still chooses to stay in the Philippines and fight the most powerful people in the country is because she must be responsible for "Rappler" and those who support "Rappler". Even, of course, she had thought about the worst outcome. For example, once when she received news at a foreign airport that she might be arrested after returning to her country, she thought of a person: Equino, who was arrested as soon as he stepped out of the tarmac. Opposition leader shot dead.

"I also thought about what if I get shot? But you know, that's where there's a little bit of gallows humor between me and my co-founders, like what if I get hit by a car on the side of the road? I think , I choose to live by my values ​​and reduce risk. Like the serenity prayer, God has given me the wisdom to understand that for the things I cannot control, I will live by my values, and for the things I can I will work hard to control things. Is that clear?"

In Ressa's response, she has always implemented the values ​​​​that she has constantly expressed to the outside world: prepare for the worst and be prepared for it, embrace fear but not be suspicious, and focus on what you can control.

"So, is this one of the things you're willing to sacrifice for the truth?"

"That's why I'm asking you, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? I have no problem with the choices I made." She asked this question first.

"I live my life without regrets, you know, like at some point, do you decide do you want kids? I went through all of this and I made the choice with my eyes wide open, and I think I do Made the right choice. So I don't want to end up in my career making the wrong choice because I'm afraid, and fear is something you can control.

▌So in your next life, do you still want to be Maria Ressa?

As a result, in 2022, after Duterte left office, he was replaced by Marcos Jr., the son of another dictator Marcos, who was elected with a high vote. Ressa completed a script about the Marcos and Coralón elections in her graduation year from college - a story about the confrontation between evil and good - and if she were asked to write another script for the 2022 Philippine elections, she would really do it. I haven't thought about how to describe it.

The Marcos family was already infamous when they were overthrown by the people and exiled to Hawaii in 1986, but no one expected that 36 years later, Marcos Jr. would successfully launder the family's corruption by relying on an organized information propaganda war. The history of corruption has returned, and the original People Power Revolution seems to have become a non-existent history overnight.

"It seems there is no hope," is what Ressa said to herself on the night of the election.

In the decades from Marcos to Marcos Jr., she has witnessed and experienced firsthand how the information war has affected herself and her country. This is why she keeps warning the world that the algorithms of social platforms have destroyed people’s understanding of the world. Shared perceptions of reality,

"If there are no facts, there is no truth; if there is no truth, there is no trust; without all three, we will not have a shared reality and our democracy will die."

However, in today's so torn virtual and real environment, how can this warning motto work, especially in 2024, when general elections will be held around the world, including the United States, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, etc. What will be the next step for democratic countries? Ressa has three solutions: the first is to create a resilient community and ensure that this community will operate based on facts and verification; the second is legislation, which she believes can no longer be regarded as "free speech" but should be " "Safety issues" because disinformation is already tearing apart the reality that people share; finally, in the long run, she pointed out that everything still has to go back to education, educating people about the manipulation issues behind this.

Looking back on the past, through crises and low points, Ressa still holds on to all kinds of hopes, because "Rappler" is still alive, because she always believes that the Philippines can establish a strong democratic mechanism, and because her tax evasion charges were dismissed in January this year , "We were acquitted, so I have hope." In "Say No to the Dictator," she told about her growth experience, beliefs, values, especially her combat experience. These battle experiences once frustrated her, but they never defeated her. Instead, they gave her the strength to stand up.

In the interview, she gave the example of pirates. She said try to imagine pirates taking over a ship. People can only do three things at this time: first, fight, but this requires the cooperation of others; second, jump off the ship, but you will die; third, most What one would do, hide.

It's like standing up to a dictator. "You have to fight, you have to have your community with you. ... I mean, if everyone has the same idea (to hide), you have to have a navy that can lead people, to really To make change happen, one person is not enough, you have to learn to lead. You know what was so fun about writing this book? It was like cathartic, like why did I become a journalist? Why do I believe this? Journalism? Its standards and its ethics, its mission, are connected to what I really value as a person, and it has helped make me who I am."

However, long-term fighting is tiring and consuming. Is there ever a time when she doesn't want to fight anymore? Or in other words, if she had the choice, would she want to be Maria Ressa again?

She muttered to herself first,

"So, if I had another life, what would it be?"

"My whole career as a journalist, looking at leaders, whether it's a news group, a club or a country, I guess I like sociology and a whole bunch of people, how can we get better? Be better ourselves, because humans are capable of both, right? We can be the worst kind of people, which is why I'm so unhappy with the incentive structure of social media. It rewards toxic, it puts Toxic sludge is pumped into all of our bodies. However, the kindness of humanity always shocks me when I am in disaster areas. You know, the Philippines is the country with the most disasters in the world..."

At this point, she found herself not really answering the question, "I don't know. I love the challenge of leadership, and I love that journalism forces you to put self-interest aside...Long answer, but not you Question. I don’t know.” She thought about it again, “Challenges have made you who you are, and failures have made you who you are now, right?”

Ressa Still didn't answer the question, right? But the answer should have been obvious, she said again, that she loved her life and had no regrets. So far, every step she takes and every decision she makes proves to us once again that this is the sacrifice she is willing to make for the truth. Therefore, she also throws this question to us as readers: "How far are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?"

Editor's note: The video is Maria Ressa's 2021 Nobel Prize speech.

*For the full text of the report, please refer to: ""How can you not be afraid when wearing a bulletproof vest?" Exclusive interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa>

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