of May 7, Maria Ressa sat before a couple of hun-
dred people in the lobby of Palma Hall, the dilap-
idated social- sciences and philosophy building
at the University of the Philippines in Quezon
City, just north of Manila. The attendees, many of
them students, had packed themselves shoulder to
shoulder on yellow chairs; hand-held fans stirred
the torpid air as a drizzle fell on the palm trees in
the courtyard. It was six days before the Philip-
pines’ midterm elections, and the country’s usual
mix of soap- opera politics and melodramatic con-
spiracy theories had reached a new intensity.
Two weeks earlier, The Manila Times, the
country’s oldest English- language newspaper,
published a list of writers, editors and lawyers
who, the paper asserted, were plotting a coup
against President Rodrigo Duterte. The news-
paper called it the ‘‘Matrix’’ and placed Ressa —
CNN’s former Southeast Asia bureau chief and
the editor of an online news site called Rappler —
near the center of the plot. The Matrix, the paper
argued, planned to ‘‘manipulate public emotion’’
with fake news, establish contact with a ‘‘Leftist
organization,’’ enlist cells in the police and the
military, ‘‘then go for the ‘kill’ ’’ — an expression
presumably meant to be taken literally. The day
the article appeared, Salvador Panelo, Duterte’s
spokesman, brandished a diagram of the Matrix
that, he claimed, had been delivered to Duterte
by a foreign intelligence agency. ‘‘They are all,’’
Panelo declared, ‘‘trying to destroy this gov-
ernment by spreading false news and planting
intrigues.’’ He later added, ‘‘The president does
not lie about these things.’’
Since it went live in January 2012, Rappler
has become one of the country’s most popular
and infl uential media platforms, mixing report-
ing with calls for social activism. Today the site
attracts an average of 40 million page views
and 12 million unique visitors a month, fi gures
that more than double during the Philippines’
election season. Rappler’s reporters, most of
whom are in their 20s, have exposed govern-
ment corruption and researched the fi nancial
holdings and potential confl icts of interest of
top political fi gures.
They have been especially critical of Duterte,
investigating his extrajudicial killing campaign
against people suspected of dealing or using
drugs, documenting the spread of government
disinformation on Facebook and reporting
on malfeasance among his top advisers. As a
result, the site has incurred Duterte’s wrath and
been targeted by his loyalists; Ressa has been
forced to increase her personal security. The
accusations in The Manila Times, propagated
by Dante Ang, the paper’s owner and publisher
and a fi erce Duterte supporter, were part of the
latest and perhaps most theatrical attempt to put
Rappler out of business and discredit Ressa and
possibly send her to jail; three months later, she
would go on trial in six separate courtrooms in
Metro Manila and face the frightening prospect
of spending decades in prison.
The rhetoric aimed at Ressa is eerily familiar
to American ears. President Trump castigates
the news media as the ‘‘enemy of the people’’
and ‘‘fake news’’ and has encouraged violence
against reporters, whom he has called ‘‘scum.’’
Duterte refers to journalists as ‘‘spies,’’ ‘‘vultures’’
and ‘‘lowlifes.’’ His wish, he has said, is to ‘‘kill
journalism’’ in the Philippines, and he has assert-
ed that ‘‘just because you’re a journalist, you are
not exempted from assassination if you’re a son
of a bitch.’’ Duterte threatened to open a tax
case against the owners of The Philippine Daily
Inquirer, a newspaper in Metro Manila that has
questioned his war on drugs, and said he might
block the franchise renewal of ABS- CBN, the
Philippines’ largest media- and- entertainment
conglomerate. Trump accused Jeff Bezos, found-
er of Amazon and owner of The Washington
Post, a frequently critical news outlet, of shirk-
ing taxes and suggested that he might use his
presidential powers to check the e-commerce
giant. When I asked Panelo whether he thought
that his boss, who has used the term ‘‘fake news’’
to describe Rappler, had appropriated Trump’s
language and style, he laughed and said, ‘‘Pres-
ident Trump is copying us now.’’
On the panel at Palma Hall, Ressa sat beside
Ellen Tordesillas, a distinguished journalist who
is a founder of VERA Files, a small news agency
that has covered Duterte since his days as mayor
of Davao City, the capital of the southern island
of Mindanao. In late April, Tordesillas learnedthat she, too, had been named a Matrix conspir-
ator by The Manila Times. Though Tordesillas
insisted to me that she wouldn’t be intimidat-
ed, Duterte intensifi ed his verbal attacks against
her in the following days, telling reporters in
one impromptu interview that he considered
her to be ‘‘every inch a prostitute.’’ (Tordesillas
would fi re back that Duterte was ‘‘not in his right
mind’’ and ‘‘a danger to the Filipino people.’’)
Ressa pointed to the other panelists. ‘‘We’ve
done nothing but be journalists, and yet I’ve had
11 cases fi led against me,’’ she told the audience,
referring to the onslaught of civil and criminal
proceedings undertaken by the Philippines’ Jus-
tice Department in the past year and a half. ‘‘I’ve
posted bail eight times in three months. I’ve
been arrested twice and been detained once.’’
‘‘We’ve posted collectively at Rappler nearly
three million pesos’’ — some $58,000 — ‘‘in bail,’’
she went on. ‘‘Compare that to Imelda Marcos.
Her bail was 450,000 pesos.’’ The reference to the
90-year-old widow of former President Ferdi-
nand Marcos, who was convicted in November
2018 of illegally funneling $200 million to Swiss
foundations in the 1970s, evoked laughter. Ressa
quickly turned things serious again: ‘‘If you’re
questioning Duterte’s drug war, you’re going to
be targeted. You’re going to be hit by very per-
sonal attacks meant to pound you into silence.’’
After the panel discussion, Ressa chatted with
admiring students and posed for selfi es, then
rode in her van back to her apartment in Taguig
City, an aff luent district of Manila about 40 min-
utes away. ‘‘ Duterte’s method with the media is
‘corrupt, coerce, co-opt,’ ’’ she said, ‘‘and he will
get you if you don’t come around through friend-
ly means.’’ Ressa nodded to the security detail
accompanying her in the van, fi xtures since her
fi rst arrest this February. ‘‘It’s a strange time,’’
she told me. ‘‘It’s defi nitely existential.’’Ressa’s refuge from her legal battles is an apart-
ment a half-hour’s drive from Rappler’s head-
quarters. A diminutive woman with rimless
glasses and short- cropped hair, Ressa, who is
56, has a hyper articulate manner and seemingly
inexhaustible energy. When I arrived for coff ee
before she started work on a weekday morning,
she was poring over scrapbooks on the wood
fl oor of her pleasingly minimalist living room for
a documentary fi lm crew that had been shadow-
ing her for a year. Two guitars, a piano and a rain
stick from Indonesia rested against one wall near
an array of stone- carved Buddha heads. The fur-
nishings — eclectic, multicultural, a blend of East
and West — are a refl ection of her outlook. Ressa
has been straddling two worlds, her birthplace
and the United States, for most of her life. That
dual identity, as much as anything else, has led
her to see the world as she does, and those views
have put her in a dangerous position.EARLY
IN THE
AFTERNOON
42 10.20.19