Threatening to strip licenses from TV news broadcasters
Journalist Maria Ressa says Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines' autocratic former president, used similar tactics. In 2020, Duterte's government refused to renew the license of the country's largest broadcaster and shut it down.
Duterte left office in 2022 and is now awaiting trial in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity for allegedly allowing tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings during his war on the country's drug trade. But Ressa says the damage he did to the news media endures.
"That network, even after the end of Duterte's reign, never got its license ... back," says Ressa, who once ran the broadcaster herself. "What is damaged in this time period, what is destroyed, stays destroyed."
Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for standing up to Duterte's attacks on her and her news site, Rappler. At one point, she faced the possibility of more than a century in prison on tax evasion and cyber-libel charges that human rights groups say were politically motivated. Ressa is spending this semester teaching at Columbia University. A dual citizen, she has a message for people here.
"Americans are slow to respond, but I know what fear does," she says. "Don't let fear paralyze you because you are at your strongest now, and every day you do not act and hold the line on your rights, you get weaker."