Why Nobel Peace Prize 2021 is important? Because this is war!
First: listen to these 58 seconds from Maria Ressa interviewing then newly elected President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte:
If you can make such an interview with your president, and keep pursuing the same transparence, you are at war.
The interview itself lead to you being singled out as an enemy of the state, along with the whole of your profession. On what basis? Because you won’t go along with disregarding the truths the president himself revealed to you in the interview.
By what threats? No threats, only promises: that his presidency will be all about dictatorship, bloodshed, police brutality, brutal military operations against the people of his own country, and that he will personally kill you if he thinks that’s what he may think he’ll say.
These kinds of attitudes towards the press has grown into a veritable trend of global dimensions. Nobody have really said it better than Duterte did right here.
Press freedom and freedom of information are people’s only weapons in the information war. It’s the last defence of truth and accountability, free elections and democracy. We all learn on a daily basis, from our leaders and idols, to attack truth, science and information.
Maria Ressa is exposing the narrative of the abusers of power. The network she co-founded, Rappler, is fighting the armed forces of censorship in the Philippines — and actually all over the world — with no other weapons than words of truth.
Without Maria Ressa, Rappler, Dmitry Muratov and Novaya Gazeta, the war against truth and information would be over, and all but censorship and crimes against humanity would lay in ruins.
Context Undisconnected 