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By Caleb Ecarma
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While Maria Ressa struggles for press freedom, and her own non-public freedom, in the Philippines, she is at least satisfied that most of the legal threats are addressed to her. “It’s smart for me to point because I’m strong enough to put up with it,” the veteran reporter told me in a recent video call, comparing her test-after-test years to “going to the gym.” Rappler’s co-discoverer and editor-in-chief faces up to six years in criminal offenses after a Manila district court found her guilty of cyber defamation in June and then rejected her recent request for review of the case.
The trial opposed to Ressa and Rappler, echoing his ex-school, journalist Reynaldo Santos Jr., represents a completely new and digitally expressed way in which hounds would possibly be involved in prosecutions. This is just one of many examples in which the media critically covering Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte would possibly be placed in legal danger, fighting for his survival. In Ressa’s case, she knows she’s being criticized for her blunt coverage. As Rappler faces false accusations, Ressa said he sought the government to “run after me so our team can continue to do its job.”
Ressa, who spent more than 3 decades in journalism, and joined as leader of CNN’s Manila office before co-founding Rappler in 2012, has faced a handful of Duterte administration lawsuits over the more than 3 years. He described the collection of instances as “in 3 categories”: the first is foreign ownership or securities fraud prosecutions; the time are instances of tax violations, 3 of which are ongoing as a result of an investigation through the country’s SEC; and the third relates to defamation lawsuits, adding the cyber defamation criminal case in which Ressa convicted. Cases of combined and continuous offenders can result in a cumulative sentence of up to one hundred years in prison.
“I’m old. This passing government decided to attack me when I was in my fifties,” said Ressa, 56, after detailing the grueling list of legal battles on his online page and his arrests since Duterte took office. “I know who I am and why I do what I do. I know the journalism project. And that’s why I can’t fasten my seat belt. It’s not an option unless you’re willing to lie about everything you’ve said you are. Ressa’s battles against Duterte’s regime earned him honors abroad, from the Press Freedom Committee’s Press Freedom Award to the Time magazine pavilion. After attending one of the George and Amal Clooney Foundation’s occasions for Justice last year, where he said he spoke on a panel about hounds imprisoned through authoritarian regimes, his mindset has replaced to embrace the worst-case scenario. “I knew I could go to jail,” he told me. “By the time I entered court on June 15, I already thought it would be a guilty verdict. (Amal Clooney is one of the lawyers who represents Ressa).
Apart from the transparent use of the courts by Duterte’s government to gag Ressa and Rappler, the most troubling facet of his case is how the slightest technical detail, a typographical error with bachelor law, allowed him to return to court. Ressa and Santos Jr. are the first hounds in the Philippines to be convicted under the Cybercrime Prevention Act 2012, which was challenged after its adoption but remained at its top in 2014. The article from which the case is derived, written through Santos Jr., was published in 2012, prior to the enactment of the law. The new law cannot be used retroactively to file defamation charges, however, Rappler’s 2012 article in question, which allegedly linked a businessman and a former Supreme Court judge of the Philippines, was updated in 2014 to correct a bachelor card: The publisher replaced the misspelled word “escape” with the right “escape”. The complainant in the case, prominent Filipino businessman Wilfredo Keng, was first dismissed as the case because it was not within the statute of limitations. But after the typographical error was corrected, government lawyers effectively argued that, in the court’s view, Rappler’s replacement amounted to the publication of a completely new article with a new publication date. (Duterte denied that the case had political motivations.)
This fast and unprecedented online technique for targeting the press is a telling sign of “the speed at which their rights can collapse,” Ressa said. “In the Philippines, I’m so shocked. It’s as if all our checks and counterweights have collapsed in six months.” In countries around the world,” he said, “citizens are witnessing the “dictators’ manual” in action right now. – which includes everything from the use of the police to eliminate protests, to the violent consolidation of the force when challenged, to the closure of an independent medium. “They are democratically elected and then launch the system’s own processes and equipment opposed to himself. Democracy is dying from within.
While social media has helped to give rise to Rappler and independent media that do not respond to governments, large companies or the acceptance of the establishment, the same platforms on which Rappler’s articles — Twiter, Facebook and WhatsApp — circulate the propaganda echo chambers they radicalize. citizens opposed to the media. “I have no doubt that there is a giant proportion of Filipinos that I am guilty of, that I am a criminal, for propaganda and influence operations and social media,” Ressa said, adding that about one hundred percent of Filipinos who are online use Facebook and that those who have access to the web on average about 10 hours a day. In the months following Rappler’s 2016 policy on Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, which included stories about how the government underestimated the official death toll, Ressa began to receive a shocking number of death threats and other social media attacks. “I was getting 90 threats on Facebook an hour,” he says. This anti-media “astroturfing” effort has used social media to virally spread the message that “journalist is equivalent to criminal,” he added. “And I thought, oh, please, this can’t paint because I have a full balance. I’m stupid, aren’t I? Ressa told me.” When you repeat it a million times, which Facebook allows, lying becomes the truth. “
Those attacks were only aggravated after Duterte used his 2017 State of the Nation standoff to convict Rappler in particular through his name. In the past, he had said in the month of his investiture that “just because he is a journalist is not exempt from homicide if he is a son of a bitch.” (President Donald Trump has been pleased with Duterte’s anti-press rhetoric.)
Rappler is just one of many media outlets that have remained at the regime’s attractions for years. Others affected by Duterte’s crusade against the media, which he considers “fake news,” come with the country’s largest television news channel, ABS-CBN, which aired in May over the Philippine Congress’s refusal to renew its license to serve as a component of an increase through many pro-Duterte lawmakers. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, the country’s most widely read newspaper and a reliable source of data on widespread human rights violations in the war on drugs, was purchased in 2017 through Ramon Ang, whom Duterte described as a “quick friend.” But Ressa’s conviction marks a moment to cross the Rubicon in the War of Duterte opposed to the press: if the courts can abandon any attempt to fake judicial fairness and use a clearly fraudulent rate to convict a world-famous journalist, then any journalist is in danger of being blocked. Up.
Duterte is not the first leader in the history of the Philippines in fashion to violently threaten the press and try to silence the media that inform other Filipinos and the world of state abuses. In September 1972, Ferdinand Marcos, then president of the Philippines, consolidated his strength by pointing out martial law and assuming the role of dictator. Over the next two decades, Marcos’ fascist regime killed thousands of Filipinos, imprisoning and torturing thousands more.
Indeed, parallels between the country’s autocrat and existing leadership make Ressa call Duterte’s presidency “not just a return to the future, worse,” because he necessarily repeats many steps that Mark used to consolidate strength and, in some cases, even more deterrent. When Marcos first took office, he was elected democratically after making populist proposals to the wishes of infrastructure development. Duterte, who has promised to be a “dictator” opposed to forces that he considers evil and whose father, Vicente Duterte, was a member of Marcos’ cupboard, used a fascist, violent and populist message to win his 2016 career, promising to pass after the criminals and “kill them all” if they resisted his arrest, a promise he struggled to fulfill. The main measure taken through Mark in the preparation of his martial law order was the publication of Proclamation No. 889, which allowed the state to arrest citizens without a warrant and detain them without charge. Since last month, the Duterte regime has had its own policy of ending habeas corpus: the Anti-Terrorism Act 2020, which allows suspects to be detained for up to 24 days without a warrant and monitored for up to 90 days if the president of the designated Anti-Terrorism Council considers them a threat. It also replaces the component of a law beyond that allowed suspects who were unfairly detained to be compensated.
In a way, Duterte in a position exerts more strength than Marcos, Ressa argued: He did not have to claim martial law to avoid ABS-CBN, which remains out of the air. In 2018, Rappler had his own license revoked, however, he continues to report due to an imminent appeal that Ressa said the site was in a position to take to the Supreme Court. Duterte also insisted on a competitive and global blockade of coronaviruses, mitigating the need for an absolute declaration of martial law. “If Filipinos simply faint in the streets, there would be mass protests,” Ressa said. “You have an approval government that says it’ll shoot you if you break quarantine rules, right? So, to pass out and protest in the Philippines, you’re not only facing a possible arrest, a possible shooting, but you can get a virus. .
At this point Ressa believes that the Philippines is “more like a dictatorship that is masquerading as a democracy with rule of law,” a state of limbo that she argued is worse than the real thing. “It’s easier for someone like me if the government were to just declare a dictatorship, so we don’t have to keep fighting for our rights,” she said. “Every generation gets the democracy it deserves, so if we’re not going to fight for our rights, then maybe we don’t deserve them. And the only thing that keeps me optimistic is I don’t think our values have changed: We still want justice.”
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