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country. But as Myanmar is trying to
pass as a democracy, the military has
grown sensitive to appearances. That’s
part of why Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo
were jailed in the first place: the two
embarrassed their government by
exposing its involvement in the
slaughter of civilians. But steady
pressure from outside—Western
governments, the U.N., Reuters—
brought home that what would really
improve Myanmar’s image was freeing
the journalists, signaling respect for the
democratic norm of press freedom.
It’s a delicate business, and far
harder when the norms are ignored.
After Trump made fake news a
catchphrase for any report he did not
like, governments from Malaysia to
Egypt to Uganda made it a legal excuse
to criminalize independent journalism.
In Cairo, the offices of the independent
news website Mada Masr were raided
and editors arrested in November, shortly
after the site reported that al-Sisi’s son
was being demoted for failing to protect
The result—sound familiar?—is a
profoundly polarized society. As well-
meaning people struggle to tell what’s
true from what’s false, distrust in all
information rises, and many folks
end up just believing what they want.
The resulting confusion undermines
democracy, because democracy after
all requires a common understanding
of reality. The ones gaining from
the confusion are despots, who cast
themselves as vessels of public anger
while pushing out their preferred
version of reality.
“If nothing significant changes,”
Ressa warns from Manila, “our
dystopian present is your dystopian
future.”
At the local level, Americans may
still know where their news comes
from: they see a reporter in church or
an editor at the store. When a gunman
obsessed with a news story blasted
into the Annapolis, Md., offices of
the Gazette newspaper the Capital on
June 28, 2018, and killed five people,
neighbors offered not emojis but
condolence cards and free counseling
for the survivors. The Capital staff,
designated the fourth set of Guardians,
kept working through everything, and
report finding both solace and more
meaning than ever in what they do.
But local news has also been
emaciated by the merciless shift of
advertising revenue to digital giants
like Google and Facebook; 7,700 media
workers lost their jobs in 2019, far
more than in the previous three years
combined. The cuts reached all-digital
newsrooms like BuzzFeed and Vice that
supposedly had found a new business
model. Meanwhile the success of a
handful of outlets like the New York
Times at funding first-class journalism
by selling subscriptions has so far
proved to be the exception.
Tech remains a paradox—delivering
more information to people, but in
ways that tend to give them less faith in
what they’re reading. Last year, TIME
concluded there was “urgent work
ahead in shaping a communications
system guided not by software but
by the judgment of citizens, and the
social contract implied in the First
Amendment: facts matter.” That work
remains to be done. □A rare bright
spot: Wa Lone
and Kyaw
Soe Oo leave
prison May 6his father’s public image. Not even U.S.
journalists are safe in Egypt these days:
in September, the New York Times
revealed that its Cairo correspondent
had to escape threatened arrest with the
help of the Irish embassy because, under
Trump, the U.S. State Department cannot
be relied upon to offer protection to
American journalists working abroad.“It’s much worse this year,” says
Maria Ressa, chief executive officer of
Rappler, the last major independent
news site in the Philippines and another
of the Guardians. “I posted bail eight
times in three months.”
Vibrant, essential and often plain
fun, Rappler stands at a crucial nexus
for journalism globally. The site func-
tions first as a watchdog to the govern-
ment of Philippine President Rodrigo
Duterte, a profane populist who not
only traduces norms but also urges the
assassination of Filipino citizens in the
name of combatting drugs. But Rap-
pler also rides herd on Facebook, which
almost totally dominates the Internet
in the former U.S. colony. Before Cam-
bridge Analytica or Russia’s Internet
Research Agency became household
names in the U.S., Rappler reporters
were documenting their government’s
use of fake accounts to intimidate critics
and drive its divisive narrative online
without leaving fingerprints.The four covers for the 2018 Person of the
Year issue. Watch TIME’s documentary
about the Capital Gazette a year after the
shooting at time.com/capital-gazette