After Ressa’s father died when she was less
than a year old, her mother left Ressa and her
sister with their paternal grandparents in Manila
and moved to the United States in search of work.
Nine years later, after Ferdinand Marcos declared
martial law, her mother returned to fetch the girls.
‘‘One day was normal, then we were on our fl ight
to the U.S.A.,’’ Ressa recalls. Ressa and her sister
moved in with their mother, American stepfather
and new sister in Toms River, N.J. At Toms River
North High School, Ressa played piano, violin
and guitar, won a countywide debate contest and
served as class president her freshman, sopho-
more and junior years. Ressa attended Prince-
ton — her classmates included Bezos, a casual
acquaintance — and wrote a play about Philippine
politics for her senior thesis. After graduating in
1986, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to
study political theater in Manila.
Ressa’s return to her native country came
as it was transitioning away from authoritar-
ianism and adopting liberal, democratic ideas
from the United States. In 1987, under the newly
inaugurated president, Corazon C. Aquino, the
country established a Constitution that limited
presidential powers and set up a bicameral leg-
islature. CNN was looking for a fl uent English
speaker to report on the transformation and hired
Ressa. She became a fi xture of the network’s Asia
coverage, on the front lines of the fi ght between
democratic ideas and authoritarianism.
Ressa was interested not only in how demo-
cratic ideals fl ourished but also in how they died,
and how extremist ideology spread like a toxin
through a society. Thirteen months after the Sept.
11 attacks, she was on assignment, investigating
Islamic terrorist networks in the Philippines, when
bombers struck two Bali nightclubs and killed 202
people. Ressa began digging. ‘‘She was connect-
ing the dots where others hadn’t,’’ recalls Atika
Shubert, whom Ressa hired as an intern in the
Jakarta bureau in 1997 and who later became a
CNN correspondent there. ‘‘At one point she said
to me, ‘These guys all went to a training program
in Afghanistan!’ ’’ Ressa’s groundbreaking report-
ing led to the 2003 publication of her fi rst book,‘‘Seeds of Terror,’’ about the nexus between the
Sept. 11 plotters and Southeast Asian terrorist cells.
In 2004, ABS- CBN hired her away from her
post as CNN’s Jakarta bureau chief to manage
its news division. Ressa returned to Manila fi lled
with ideas about the power of the news media to
bolster democracy and expose and check lead-
ers’ authoritarian impulses. By then, she under-
stood how terrorist ideology had found a home
online and how social media allowed ideas to
spread with exponential force. ‘‘From Bin Laden
to Facebook,’’ her second book, published in
2013, was a deep dive into the dissemination
of terrorist ideology on the internet, an inves-
tigation that foreshadowed the Islamic State’s
recruitment of acolytes via social media. ‘‘Maria
was fascinated by the spread of an idea,’’ Shubert
says. ‘‘A lot of people looked at terrorism strictly
in terms of security and logistics. Maria saw that
it was much more.’’
Ressa knew that the place to combat that ide-
ology was where it spread, and the Philippines
was rapidly growing more connected. YoungPhotograph by Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 43
Journalists at Rappler’s headquarters in Manila. Opening pages: Maria Ressa making
her way to Rappler’s office after an appearance in court in June.