Maria Ressa

The Nobel Peace Prize 2021
Co-Nobelist: Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov

Journalist, Filipino & American. Co-founder & CEO of Rappler, a Filipino online news website. Detailed the weaponization of social media & exposed government corruption & human rights violations in Philippines. Investigative reporter in Southeast Asia.

"Where we spend our time determines what we accomplish and at what we become good."

Maria Ressa

Recipient of Nobel Prize in Peace 2021

Bio by Lalitha M. Kutty, M.S. [Library & Information Science], M.A. [English Literature]

The 2021 Nobel Prize was awarded to Filipino-American journalist Ms. Maria Ressa who was one of the co-founders of the Rappler, a Manila-based digital media company. Through Rappler, which is known for its investigative journalism, Ressa detailed the weaponization of social media and exposed government corruption and human rights violations in the Philippines. The Nobel Committee states that “as an investigative journalist, she has distinguished herself as a fearless defender of freedom of expression and has exposed the abuse of power, use of violence and increasing authoritarianism of the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte. Ressa has focused critical attention on President Duterte’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign. She and Rappler have also documented how social media are being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.” She shares the prize with Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov "for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” In an interview with PBS, Ressa stated, “I became a journalist because information is power. And now the very structure of our information ecosystem is corrupted from the top. When a lie spreads faster than a fact, when you tell a lie a million time and it becomes a fact, people cannot tell fact from fiction.”

The Rappler website was launched in 2012 and Ressa served as its CEO and executive editor. The site grew quickly, becoming one of the largest news sources in the Philippines. It gained a significant amount of attention, when, in 2015 Ressa interviewed Rodrigo Duterte, then the mayor of Davao City and he admitted to having killed three persons. After he was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, Rappler was one of the few news organizations in the country to criticize his policies. It published extensively on his war on drugs, in which thousands of extrajudicial killings had taken place. Other stories exposed government corruption and human rights violations. Ms. Ressa continued to investigate social media. In 2016 and 2017 she documented how the Philippine government and its supporters used social media to spread disinformation, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse. In 2016, when Duterte came to power he launched a drug war in which thousands of people were killed in police anti-narcotics operations. Rappler published shocking images of the killings and questioned the legality of the crackdown. Her conflicts with the government were the subject of the documentary A Thousand Cuts(2020).

Since 2018, Ressa has faced a range of civil and criminal charges in that which is widely considered a campaign to silence dissent. A case against Ressa alleged that Rappler had failed to include proceeds of a 2015 sale of depositary receipts to foreign investors in its tax returns. She has been acquitted of tax evasion charges, in a case she has described as part of a pattern of harassment. In 2019 Ressa was arrested again on the charge that Rappler violated laws regarding foreign ownership of the company. Attacks against her had increased after Rappler published an exposé in 2016 that outlined how Duterte supporters manipulated Facebook to build support for him and drown out his opponents. The Rappler site became one of the first multimedia news websites and a major news portal in the Philippines. It received numerous local and international awards.

Maria Ressa who holds a dual citizenship, was born on October 2, 1963 in Manila, Philippines. At the age of nine, with her family, she moved to the United States. She was raised in Toms River, New Jersey. In 1986, from Princeton University, Ms. Ressa graduated cum laude and obtained an A.B. in English and certificates in theater and dance. Then she returned to Philippines on a Fulbright Fellowship to study political theater and obtained a master’s degree at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Ressa’s return to the Philippines coincided with a series of popular demonstrations known as the People Power Revolution. As the country transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, Ressa embarked on a career in journalism. The flagship station of the Philippine government’s television network is PTV. Early on she worked for ABS-CBN, a Philippine news and entertainment broadcaster and PTV-4. Ressa then joined CNN, working as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent as well as serving as bureau chief in Manila (1987–95) and Jakarta in Indonesia (1995–2005). As CNN's lead investigative reporter in Asia, she specialized in investigating terrorist networks in South East Asia. Ressa was also an author-in-residence at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) of Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Ressa is the author of three books about terrorism in Southeast Asia:
Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center (2003)
From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism (2013)
How to Stand Up To a Dictator (2022)

Ressa’s awards and recognition include:

TIME Person of the Year - 2018
Excellence in Broadcasting Lifetime Achievement from the Philippine Movie Press Club - 2015
Democracy Award by the National Democratic Institute – 2017
Knight International Journalism Award – 2018
Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers – 2018
Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists – 2018
TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of the World – 2019
UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize - 2021
Columbia Journalism Award from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism - 2019

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