In her 38 years as a journalist, Maria Ressa has been subjected over and over again to changes in the journalism landscape. As of late, the biggest threats to her work were the disinformation, trolling, and suppression by the state that marked the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte, a phase the country has yet to recover from as its aftermath continues to unfold.
“We’re standing on the rubble of the world that was and now we have to rebuild,” she tells Rolling Stone Philippines’ Chief of Editorial Content Jonty Cruz in a Q&A during Rolling Stone Philippines’ maiden issue launch.
Her mission now is to navigate the rubble while also dealing with newer challenges in the digital age.
“Journalism could die this year,” Ressa says in her interview with Human Rights Watch senior researcher and journalist Carlos H. Conde for Rolling Stone Philippines. According to her, Big Tech powers the disinformation machine that threatens democracy, and the only way to quash it is through journalism and community building, which she, her news outlet, Rappler, and its socio-civic arm MovePH have been doing since their founding in 2011.
Ressa’s fight for press freedom is one informed by decades of experience. Here are her biggest milestones as a journalist.
Early Work and Investigating Terrorism
From 1987 to 1995, she ran CNN’s Manila bureau before heading the Jakarta bureau, where she worked until 2005. During that time, she investigated terrorist networks in Southeast Asia, publishing Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia in 2003. She went on to head ABS-CBN’s news division until 2010.
As a writer-in-residence at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University, her work culminated in the 2013 book, From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, which examined terrorist operations in the decade following 9/11 and illustrated the internet as a political arena.
Rappler and the Digital Age
In 2011, Ressa co-founded Rappler, which rose to prominence in 2016 when she led its coverage of the war on drugs during the Duterte administration. The news site also investigated disinformation campaigns suspected of being linked to Duterte.
Facebook, the social media platform where disinformation had grown rampant, tapped Rappler’s fact-checking team to help flag content in the Philippines and made the news site one of its official third party fact-checkers in 2018. So when its parent company Meta announced that it was ending its fact-checking program in January 2025, Ressa warned of “dangerous times ahead” for journalism, democracy, and social media.
Legal Battles and Accolades
Even before Meta ended its partnership with fact-checkers, Rappler and Ressa had already faced several other issues. Ressa began fighting a series of legal battles in 2017, when the Securities and Exchange Commission revoked the company’s registration and license to operate on the charge of foreign ownership, but the Court of Appeals overturned the decision in August 2024, allowing the news site to continue operations.
Ressa was arrested in December 2018 on allegations of tax evasion, but after prosecutors failed to provide evidence that she had earned from investments secured by Rappler, she was acquitted by the Court of Tax Appeals in 2023.
In February 2019, she was arrested again on accusations of cyber libel in relation to a Rappler story connecting Filipino-Chinese businessman Wilfredo Keng to the impeached former Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Journalists and human rights groups deemed the arrests a threat to freedom of expression. Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who was on Ressa’s legal team in the cyber libel case, called Ressa “a courageous journalist who is being persecuted for reporting the news and standing up to human rights abuses.”
Ressa’s legal cases were part of a larger issue regarding press freedom in the Philippines, under which 23 journalists were killed, according to a report by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP). The NUJP also recorded 159 cases of red-tagging against journalists from 2016 to 2024, further underscoring Ressa’s work to defend press freedom and democracy.
In 2022, she published her memoir How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, which chronicles the conflicts she faced as a journalist. Ressa was also recognized as Time’s Person of the Year in 2018 and given other accolades such as the Ka Pepe Diokno Human Rights Award in 2019, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, and Cannes LionHeart in 2024.
Her interview with human rights advocate Carlos Conde can be read in full in Rolling Stone Philippines’ maiden issue. Read the excerpt here.
