Maria Ressa’s conviction, and the Philippines’ dire information climate

“Evation.” Yesterday, authorities in the Philippines used that typo to convict Maria Ressa, the crusading journalist who founded the independent news site Rappler, and her former colleague Reynaldo Santos of “cyber-libel” charges. The typo appeared in a May 2012 article in which Santos linked Wilfredo Keng, a Filipino businessman, to the human-trafficking and drug trades. The story was published four months before the Philippines introduced the law under which the cyber-libel charges would eventually be brought, placing the story beyond that law’s scope. Then, in 2014, Rappler spotted and fixed the typo. Prosecutors argued that the fix amounted to “republication” of the article, which meant the cyber-libel law applied to it after all. That interpretation, like almost everything else about the case, was a stretch—this morning, Ressa decried it as “legal acrobatics”—but that didn’t stop a judge handing down a guilty verdict. Ressa and Santos could now face up to six years in prison. They plan to appeal. Whatever the eventual sentence, the verdict is another sharp blow to press freedom in the Philippines, whose authoritarian president, Rodrigo Duterte, has waged a relentless campaign to silence critics, including Ressa, who have spoken out about atrocities including a war on drugs that has claimed at least twelve thousand Filipino lives to date, many at the hands of the state. The Philippines’ National Union of Journalists said the verdict against Ressa and Santos “basically... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-06-16 12:23:58 UTC ]

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