Ramona Díaz’s most recent documentary, A Thousand Cuts, features former CNN correspondent and co-founder of Rappler Maria Ressa, a fearsome Filipino journalist born in the country who spent much of her youth, as well as her college years, in the United States. she celebrates when she began to be the target of the violent populist government of President Rodrigo Duterte and his online supporters. The attacks have intensified in terms of political retaliation, and the government has adopted rates, from cyberdefation to tax evasion, as opposed to Ressa and Rappler, a news site. On 15 June, Ressa was convicted of the first cyber defamation rate to oppose him.
Thousand Cuts follows Ressa, as well as a handful of his colleagues/employees of Rappler, from the police who beat journalist Rambo Talabong to investigative journalist Patricia Evangelista, who spent years on the floor covering the government’s brabably open graphic. mandatory killings of deficient Filipinos who are, rightly or no, drug addicts and drug traffickers. The film also follows two of Duterte’s most fervent and influential followers, social media personality and former dancer Mocha Uson and former police general Bato dela Rosa.
Despite his panoptic vision, A Thousand Cuts focuses on Ressa and the excessive nature of his plight. Around the world, hounds are attacked, imprisoned, disappeared and even killed (like The exiled Saudi Jamal Khashoggi) for doing their job. Ressa, who chose to live in the Philippines rather than the United States after the popular revolution that overthrew Marcos’ dictatorship in 1986, has returned several times to the Philippines rather than seeking to escape the problems that have been waiting for him for years. The Daily Beast spoke to Ressa about the main vital findings of a global decline towards authoritarianism.
This is a very delicate time for you, Maria, when this film is filmed while you’re in the midst of confusing processes involving retaliation for political reasons that oppose you.
I want to realize that we were in the quicksand, it’s an exclusive moment and we knew that in 2016 we were under attack. Then we ask ourselves: how do you relate? And then I looked for it to be documented, but I couldn’t use Rappler’s resources in the long run because we’re so small. Our organization has about one hundred people in total and we only have 25 publishers. Even in our video group, we paint like crazy. So I felt bad even thinking someone was documenting us. And then, if it’s someone who knows you well who documents you if it’s an internal thing, then it gets dark with a lot of things. There were several other people who asked, who followed me for periods of time. That’s when Ramona got here. That’s my context. I looked for it to be documented, and I’m not going to pay for it.
How is trust generated? Of course, I knew Ramona’s paintings because in 2004 she turned me down by an interview for [her documentary] Imelda. And at that moment, I’m on CNN. I knew I had another scenario, which is the kind of fact that cinema flies on the wall. But my thing is that at some point a journalist makes a resolution because if you make a daily story, you make a resolution without delay as to setting, as to hitale. And, of course, there are only 8 themes in the world. Every story is a component of that. So it judges the talking user. You don’t tell people, however, if someone is a lie to you, you know it is for you and you put it in context. So that’s what he had to succeed about because I’m not absolutely convinced of his frames.
I felt that the film was actually largely following what seemed to me to be at least your personality, Maria, which is this ability to take serious moments or chaos, and constantly rethink and recontextualize, to tell the other people around you (or the audience) that this is how we deserve to see it. And it’s a very journalistic trait, however, the fact that you can do it in your genuine life in a genuine time is impressive. They’re all others when they’re documented in some way, but were you thinking about this habit when shooting the movie?
No. At one point, I forgot they were there because they were components of Rappler in a strange way, you know? And yet Array, the things we were dealing with were irrelevant. And that’s all I learned from CNN when you’re in a conflict zone. I became a CNN reporter in 1987, and in 1987, live shooting charged $10,000 for every 10 minutes. So you didn’t do a lot of live images from the Philippines.
The thing about live shooting is that you have a maximum of two minutes, maybe a minute and a half. And if your mind is organized, if you’re not in that minute and a half, you lose your window. So it’s an excellent and glorious workout because I learned to take a global complex and boil it at 3 points, because that’s all you can get in a minute.
I’ve learned a lot in the last 4 years, yet it’s been four years of those [Duterte and his administration] attacks. That’s the big difference. I’m used to being a journalist and being in a war zone for two weeks. Three weeks, and you’re going crazy if you’re still in a conflict zone. Three weeks, it scares you to the edges; adjusts the way you look at the world. I have had colleagues, some of whom are no longer, who become dependent on it because there is a safe adrenaline rush and war zone politics that is not constructive for you. This makes you lose your connections, the connections that are important to your circle of family and friends. So they gave me the conflict report at the right time, I think. And I was looking to build something. That’s why I’m in the Philippines. Let’s hope we didn’t make the wrong decision.
There are comparisons with America in the film and what’s here with Trump and his administration. The types of populist dictators like Duterte and Trump work by trying to manipulate the law. When the very premise of democracy, the very premise of equity, is it sufficient to react with the same team that you would have used in a just and equitable society?
I think it’s a perfect consultation. And I think that’s coming down right now. We were talking about David Kaye – he was the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and coverage of the right to freedom of opinion and expression – [because] his last day was last night. And the question I asked him, and this one is similar to yours, is: “If the facts are debatable,” because the biggest challenge right now is that the world’s biggest news distributor is social media, and those platforms make sure lies are connected. anger and hatred spread faster than facts.
But [the consultation I did to him] Array “If the facts are debatable” – which is the biggest problem, is the catalyst for the emergence of virtual authoritarians, like Trump and Duterte or Bolsonaro or Orbon in Hungary – “and we know that giant teams of other people are manipulated through geopolitical forces, can we even have democracy? Do we have the integrity of the election if we don’t have facts? So, if you think about it, that’s why the news hounds are being attacked all over the world. The Reporters Without Borders report to the CPJ tells him that over the past decade, attacks on hounds have come to an end. Once again, David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur, last night published a report indicating that COVID-19 completes the virtual spaces.
The law is the next step, because facts are where it all begins, right? The facts are where two opposing sides, whether a journalist or someone else at the source, can have an argument. But if they have other facts, you have a big problem. And what’s the law? The law speaks to the facts. It’s checking to get society in order. So there’s a responsibility, but if your facts are questionable, you can’t have laws. It’s also everything I’ve learned over the last 4 years, working with people like Amal Clooney and Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Covington’s lawyers who [deal with my case], I realize that, as news hounds fight for the facts and the truth, lawyers … in the Philippines and the United States, in foreign law and, God forbid, in foreign human rights laws: all this is lately quicksand, and they are reviewing to outline it because the facts are questionable.
So all this is connected in our world. I don’t think there’s any other time that’s in the face of artistic destruction as it is now. And I’ve lived a lot in Indonesia, in the Philippines. I mean, today, Array everything we thought we knew was crushed and destroyed because the facts are questionable. All the old systems we’ve put in place can’t work when the facts are questionable, when manipulating other people.
We have had courts and tribunals throughout history, but have not worked on the same set of facts as, for example, some marginalized members of the population. You can simply take the Guatemalan genocide, for example, and the inability to make the formula fully listen to indigenous voices. But now those disorders are maintained in a very disconcerting way. How do you see the truth that there are all these other people in the Philippines who have legitimately felt marginalized through previous, even democratic, governments and are now turning to populism?
It’s like the arrival of COVID in the world: the old upheavals are there and have not been solved. And then you come in with that layer of generation load that literally transforms us all. I refer to social media as a formula for behaviour modification. And now he’s gone from governments to private individuals. That’s how it happened. And then you raise that pandemic layer. That’s what I mean, it’s all rubble. And again, I know very well because I’ve been the target of those disinformation campaigns. The doctrine of the Russian army includes such influence operations, such as the United States, that others forget. Influence operations aim to convert other people’s thinking. So adjust the way they act.
You don’t get justice by creating some other mistake. No, you. In our case in the Philippines, it was one of our reporters who said, “What does Duterte need and how he catches the crowd?” Because he promises them revenge, doesn’t he? Again, the 1 consistent with a penny as opposed to the 99 consistent with a penny, global inequality is there, but we do not solve the challenge with more injustice. And then I think, literally, because I had been the target of these misogino attacks, the kind of exponential attacks that claim to dehumanize me for others to hate, is an incitement to hatred. And the last time a friend of mine said, because I started to appear some of the literally unpleasant things that I woke up with, he said, “You know, that’s exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews, because when you’re dehumanized, then it opens the door to violence and surely there’s no sense of fairness in that.
I think it’s one of the moments in history where there’s not just one nation, the local is global and the global is local because Silicon Valley has made the decisions about how facts are distributed to all of us in the world. And that’s just not true. The decisions they made caused genocide in Myanmar, deaths in the Philippines and the war on drugs, I may be going to jail. I love the consultation because it extends it to justice, that’s why I still have become a journalist! Now, for Filipinos, our establishments are weak at best, corruption is endemic, law and order are an illusion, regardless of power. But for decades, from 1986 to 2016, if you look at all the investigations, Filipinos turned to news agencies for a sense of justice.
It’s still a quest for justice, rarely is it? That’s what drives us. That’s why we have a civilized society. because we know there deserves to be a rule of law, but the paradigm, the paradigm is broken. If you have no facts, even if certain facts are questionable, at least let us agree to the shared facts.