Maria Ressa is one of two journalists who won the Nobel peace prize last year for her defence of media freedom – yet she now faces years of imprisonment in a Philippines jail. Her conviction for criminal defamation has been upheld by that country’s court of appeal and she awaits a hearing before the supreme court. Coming down the tracks are seven more cases. She is currently on bail but, given the high number of extrajudicial killings that have been the hallmark of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte’s ignominious rule, she has been forced to wear a bulletproof vest when on the road. Standing up to a dictator has a heavy price.
What flows through this, Ressa’s memoir, is a strong ethical sense that journalism has to be grounded in honesty and truth-telling, in evidence and incontrovertible facts. An experienced and acclaimed journalist, Ressa made her career at CNN, setting up and running the Southeast Asia Bureau during the 1990s. Born in the Philippines then raised and educated in the US, she had returned after graduation and found her way into the media at an exciting time – colonialism had ended and democracy seemed possible.
