ST Executive Editor Sumiko Tan's virtual interview with Philippines' Nobel Prize winner, journalist Maria Ressa, on Feb 15, 2022. - The Straits Times/ANN
SINGAPORE, Feb 27 (The Straits Times/ANN): When Maria Ressa was 10, she moved from the Philippines to the United States.
Growing up in the suburban town of Toms River, New Jersey, a "short brown kid... in this big white world", as she once described it, she was determined to play basketball.
"I was really short," she tells me, "but I wanted to play basketball. So I just said, 'I'm gonna learn to play basketball'."
And she did.
As well as softball, and eight musical instruments.
At Toms River High School North, she did sports, played the violin in the orchestra, took part in the chorus, acted in plays and was class president three times.
When she graduated, she was voted by her classmates as "Most Likely to Succeed".
And succeed she did.
In October last year, the Filipino-American journalist won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, together with fellow journalist Dmitry Muratov from Russia.
The prize was "for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace", said the Nobel committee.
As co-founder and CEO of the Philippines website Rappler, Ms Ressa has been an outspoken critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, which has claimed thousands of lives.
She has faced legal battles in the Philippines, including being found guilty of "cyber-libel" in 2020. She has described the cases against her as "political tools", but the government maintains they are legitimate.
She has also fought against misinformation. Tech giants, she argues, are fuelling a flood of "toxic sludge" on social media and aiding the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.
We are meeting over Zoom on Feb 15. She has just rushed back to her Manila home after a meeting on budgets, and I've been allotted 45 minutes before she takes another call.
"Before the Nobel, I felt like I was always constantly trying to swim up two oceans of water," she says. "Afterwards, it's become like four oceans of water."
It's lunchtime but she's not eating. I've brought along a sandwich and tea from the Toast Box in my office building.
I've not met her before but have heard her speak at media conferences in the early 2010s, where she shared how Rappler was growing its audience.
I remember her as a lively speaker, a petite woman barely visible on the rostrum with an American-accented voice that rang loud and clear across the conference hall.
Over Zoom, Ms Ressa, 58, is equally energetic and eloquent. She is also charming, with a warmth that comes across even on a small screen. It is easy to see why people gravitate towards her.
She speaks in long paragraphs, often veering into intellectual reflections on side topics, but always pulling back to the question at hand.
She has given umpteen interviews on her Nobel win and her life story, but manages to muster the energy to make it all sound fresh and new.
Sliding doors
She was born Maria Angelita Delfin Aycardo in Manila in October 1963.
Her father died when she was one. Her mother was at the time pregnant with her sister.
Her mother later left for the United States and the girls stayed in the Philippines with the family of Ms Ressa's father.
Her mother remarried, to an American-Italian she met in New York, and went back to the Philippines to get the two girls in 1973.
I tell her that I'd read there was some kind of custody issue at the time. Was it that dramatic, I ask.
It was dramatic, Ms Ressa says of her move to the US. In fact, she shares, she writes about this in her upcoming book titled How To Stand Up To A Dictator.
Her parents worked in New York City but bought a house in Toms River so the children didn't have to grow up in an inner-city school. She and her sister took their stepfather's surname, Ressa.
In the US, her mother worked for a time with an Indonesian company and also the Italian Trade Commission, where she marketed Italian wines and food.
Her stepfather, whom she regards as her dad, started as a messenger at a Wall Street bank and rose to be in charge of its mainframe computers.
Her parents had to commute four hours a day to get to work. "They worked really hard to give us a good life," she says.
Her mother went on to have two more daughters and a son. Her parents also adopted two Vietnamese boys.
"I grew up realising that there isn't only one culture or one reality," Ms Ressa says. "That you can see the same thing through many different lenses."
When she arrived in the US, she couldn't speak English and had to learn American culture.
She learnt fast.
As an immigrant kid, she realised that "you are your own worst enemy".
"Your fears are the ones that will stop you from doing anything. So, when I was still in school, I learnt that whatever it is I was most afraid of, I needed to touch it and embrace it so that I could rob it of its sting," she says.
"Courage is just knowing how to handle your fear... I learnt that when I was very young, because why would you want to stand in your own way?"
After her high-achieving years at Toms River High, she applied to 13 colleges including West Point. "I applied to military school because I thought I needed discipline," she laughs.
She got into pre-med at Ivy League university Princeton. But she realised medicine wasn't for her as she didn't like the sight of blood. There was also a laboratory class where she watched someone sabotage another person's experiment. "I was like, okay, I don't like what this is teaching us. What is our medical profession going to look like?"
She switched to literature, theatre and dance - "things that seemed frivolous at the time".
For her senior thesis, she wrote a play about a child who was a Filipino figure, a mother who was the Aquino figure, and a grandmother who was the Marcos figure. It was both personal as well as a political allegory. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a certificate in theatre and dance.
In 1986, she got a one-year Fulbright fellowship to do political theatre at the University of the Philippines.
It was her first time back after 13 years. The People Power revolution that year had led to the departure of President Ferdinand Marcos and the new government of Corazon Aquino was coming in.
She couldn't speak Tagalog well after her years in the US and had to find her footing.
"It's really like sliding doors. They're like different realities," she says of her return.
The Philippines in 1986 was "a time of joy", she remembers. She loved it back then. "When I was in the States growing up, I never felt completely American. I wasn't aggressive enough, I wasn't articulate enough. I felt like I wasn't American. I wasn't blonde and white," she laughs.
The thing she loved most was the lack of cynicism then in the Philippines. "The lack of sarcasm. Because when you're in New York, sarcasm is part of the culture and I never really took well to sarcasm."
A former school friend was an anchor for the government television station and Ms Ressa would follow her to the station to watch. That led to her working nights at the station directing newscasts - her entry into journalism. "I learnt the country through the news."
Entering journalism
When her fellowship ended, she produced public affairs programmes. In 1988, she joined CNN and set up its Manila bureau. She headed it until 1995, when she moved to Jakarta to head the bureau there.
She would often transit in Singapore - where she bought her books - and she also reported on the Republic.
She remembers reporting on Mr Lee Kuan Yew handing the prime ministership to Mr Goh Chok Tong in 1990, standing outside Changi Prison to report on the caning of American Michael Fay for vandalism in 1994, and when Singapore discovered a Jemaah Islamiah terrorist network in 2001.
"Singapore, I love Singapore," she says with a laugh. "You can compete globally. You're a First World country."
She adds: "Singapore has this left brain, right brain balance. And one of the things that I loved about Singapore is that it plans. You're like the little locus of planning in this chaotic South-east Asia. I loved that you had 10-year plans."
She adds a caveat that while she thinks order is good, you need "a little bit of chaos for creation, because that's when creation happens".
She was reporting from Jakarta during the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and in 2002, wrote a book on terrorism titled Seeds Of Terror, about the Al-Qaeda in South-east Asia.
In January 2005, she left CNN and returned to Manila to head the news division at the ABS-CBN network. She was in charge of 1,000 journalists across radio, television and cable platforms. She left in 2010.
She spent eight months in Singapore as author-in-residence and senior fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence & Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. She wrote the book From Bin Laden To Facebook.
The idea of Rappler took shape when she was in Singapore. The name amalgamates "rap" (to discuss) and "ripple" (to make waves), and Rappler was targeted at a Filipino public that was rapidly going online.
She and three women journalists launched it as a website in January 2012. It made a name for doing hard-hitting investigative stories. Among other things, her reporters exposed how fake and spam-heavy accounts of Duterte supporters were used to manipulate online discourse. She has been subjected to an online hate campaign and arrests.
Ms Ressa, who is single, says she stepped down as executive editor in November 2020 because of the legal cases.
"I am not hypocritical. I couldn't interview a government official and ask about rule of law without saying you violated my rights," she says. "It was better that I no longer have any editorial position." She handles the business, tech and data parts of the business.
In 2018, she was included in Time magazine's Person of the Year as one of 11 journalists from around the world combating fake news.
I ask her if her journalism has changed from her mainstream days at CNN to one that is more about advocacy. She says the standards of ethics of journalism have remained the same for her. But what has changed in journalism is technology, in particular social media.
"Because of the business model, because of engagement metrics, because of human behaviour, the algorithms of distribution actually spread lies laced with anger and hate faster and farther than facts," she says.
"Today's social media has become a behaviour modification system, and that is extremely dangerous."
Social media has made facts debatable. "So, when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism... because it is a battle for facts."
She describes herself as an optimistic person who believes in the good. "I'm not a cynic. But I understand why people become cynics."
Does she think she would have won the Nobel Prize if she had been a journalist based in Singapore, I wonder.
She laughs and says she was in fact offered a media job here but declined. "I felt that if I was there, we would run into some fundamental differences of values, right?"
She says she tells her staff at Rappler: "When you have the ability to control, sometimes if you don't know when to lift control, you're not going to be able to let people surprise you, right?
"The act of creation is having the technique, planning and discipline, but then being able to let go and go with the flow, right?"
She adds with a laugh: "If I did work in Singapore, I would probably follow all the rules. Because I'm that kind of person normally, you know.
"But following the rules also means you're not testing yourself. You're not creating yourself. You're not finding your boundaries."
She says that for all that she has gone through under the Duterte government, President Duterte "forced me to define my values, to define who I am, to define how far I would go to protect my rights and to protect what the Philippine Constitution says".
We've been speaking for 45 minutes and she's getting reminders that she needs to take another call. We say a hurried goodbye.
When I google her a few days later, I read that she is in the US, after getting last-minute clearance to fly from the Philippines government.
She is in fact back at her alma mater Toms River High School North in New Jersey, where she is being honoured for her Nobel win.
She also does a session with students who ask for advice on life.
"Aim high," she tells the bright-eyed teenagers gathered around her.
Just like she did many years ago. - The Straits Times/ANN
