SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
On Friday, the Justice Department rescinded a Biden-era policy that provided protections for journalists in leak investigations. The change paves the way for authorities to potentially use subpoenas and compel testimony from reporters in probes targeting leakers. This is the type of announcement that worries Maria Ressa, especially when viewed in the context of scores of other moves made by the Trump White House. Ressa is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who, for years, has been a champion of press freedoms around the world.
Ressa co-founded the investigative news site Rappler in 2012 in her home country of the Philippines, and it was there that she spent years covering the administration of the country's former president Rodrigo Duterte and his violent war on drugs. Her reporting made Ressa the target of that administration, and she was arrested a number of times until she was ultimately convicted of libel in 2020.
Now Ressa has a stark warning that the United States of America is sliding toward authoritarianism at an alarming rate. She joins me now to talk more about it. Welcome.
MARIA RESSA: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: Let me start with this. How much of what is happening in America in 2025 feels familiar to you?
RESSA: Oh, my God, I feel like I have - it's - I feel like it's both deja vu and I have PTSD - you know, very, very familiar. And it actually unleashed, I suppose, what is, like, suppressed anger at the pit of my stomach. So I'm trying to control that, too.
DETROW: There's a lot of things happening right now in the world of concerns about authoritarianism, in the world of press freedom.
RESSA: Yeah.
DETROW: What are some of these specific things over the past 100 or so days that you have said, this is bad?
RESSA: I mean, on every front - you know, look, in the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte. We have a constitution like the United States. It's patterned after the United States - three co-equal branches of government - and under Duterte, that collapsed within six months of taking office. All of these moves that he had done have accelerated in the United States, and I would say, you know, let's look at them in phases, right? There are four levels that I keep thinking of. You know, the accelerant, of course, is technology...
DETROW: Yeah.
RESSA: ...Right? - because our public information ecosystem on social media literally is on the side of lies. The second level of attack will be news organizations, media. And in the Philippines, we talked about it as the three Cs - corrupt, coerce, co-opt. When you get that, then you move to the next layer, academe. After that, it's NGO - so academe, NGO, and then the last layer is state, state capture. You capture every single one, and as you move up the ranks, your rule of law diminishes. Rule of law begins to collapse. You normalize things that would have been not just illegal, but criminal.
DETROW: One of the storylines of these past 100 days has been the way that President Trump has targeted one institution or another in a variety of different ways. Columbia University - where, I should say, you're currently teaching...
RESSA: Yeah.
DETROW: ...The first in a wave of colleges being targeted, saying, these grants are at risk unless you change certain things. Big law firms that typically act with democratic organizations or actors - saying, we are going to put all sorts of consequences on you unless you cut a deal. I could go on, but you have seen so many examples of organizations saying, you know what? We are going to take that deal because we still want to survive.
I feel like everybody imagines themself, would I stand up or would I not when I face pressure like that? You were in that situation. Your news organization was targeted. You were arrested. I imagine there could have been many times where you would have thought or said, You know what? Somebody else could do this. I would like to not be in jail. Did you ever come close to cutting some sort of deal? And what did you think about in those moments when you realized the pressure was on you?
RESSA: You know, I - you don't know who you are until you're forced to fight for it. If I had left, I would have weakened the press collectively 'cause A, silence is consent, but literally giving up, volunteering to give up your rights - I guess I felt like I'm old enough. At that point - I came under attack when I was in my 50s, and I was like, I - if I really believe in these values, I'm just going to have to move forward. And the crazy thing is that you don't know what will work. You just take it step by step by step, and my guiding light, the North Star, are the values you live by.
And I think this is the challenge for everyone. People want instant answers. But the battle to retain your rights - don't voluntarily give up your rights. I felt like I couldn't do this both for myself - like, how would I wake up and look in the mirror the next day? - but also how do I face the people I recruited, the people who believe in this? And even worse than that is, what does that mean for your ideals? I wasn't willing to kill it.
And ultimately, in the end - and I think this is the best advice - whatever it is you're most afraid of, you have to embrace your fear, and think it out. Think through the worst-case scenario. Workflow it. In Rappler, we drilled it. And then once you knock that out, then you can stand up and stand by your values. These times matter.
DETROW: There is a lot of evidence that a lot of people in the country simply do not care what a reporter and an expert have to say about this topic and the dire warnings being said into microphones, including somebody who won the Nobel Peace Prize, or maybe even because of, right? There is an antiexpert sentiment that is real in this country. There is an antimedia sentiment that is real in this country. It is a pervasive thing. And I'm sure there's people hearing this who are rolling their eyes at what we're saying. How do you respond to that moment? How, as someone who has deep concerns, do you get a message through in that moment?
RESSA: I think it's - what we did in the Philippines is to move into the physical world, right? You know the work that we've done in Rappler shows you that it all begins with the corrupted environment of our technology. The public information ecosystem literally has manipulated our realities, has - you know, if it is illegal in the world to segregate people, in the physical world, we're segregated online. And a growth algorithm, the friends-of-friends algorithm, literally has caused the polarity that we're living through.
So I actually will keep doing the stories, will keep speaking. And if I see you face to face and we think different things, I'll engage with you in the way that we should. I think this is what journalists do. So, there's a lot to unpack there 'cause it isn't just, like, this person believes this because of. This person has been insidiously manipulated. And does that mean we stop trying to reach the person? Absolutely not.
DETROW: That is Maria Ressa, co-founder of the investigative news site Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Thank you so much.
RESSA: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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