people were going online in huge numbers,
usually on mobile devices, and Ressa viewed
them as instruments of change. In 2011, Ressa
and fi ve colleagues from ABS- CBN left their jobs
and amassed $2 million in seed money. (Ressa
retains 23.7 percent of the shares of Rappler.)
They recruited six journalists and equipped
each one with an iPhone and a laptop. Rappler
— a portmanteau of ‘‘rap’’ and ‘‘ripple,’’ as in
ripples of change — went live on Jan. 1, 2012.
At fi rst, remembers Glenda Gloria, an original
partner and now Rappler’s managing editor,
Rappler reporters ‘‘were the laughingstock,
doing live reports with their iPhones.’’ Compet-
itors derided the mostly female reporting staff
as ‘‘Rappler- ettes.’’ But Rappler made its mark
covering a devastating cyclone and breaking
a story about a Philippine university that had
granted the Supreme Court chief justice a civil-
law doctorate without a dissertation. He was
eventually impeached after multiple charges of
corruption. The news site also began to take an
interest in a brutishly charismatic mayor named
Rodrigo Duterte.
In late 2015, Pia Ranada, a 25-year-old Rappler
reporter new to the politics beat, volunteered to
cover Duterte’s long-shot bid for the presidency.
She began trailing him to campaign events before
the rest of the news media caught on, and the
two developed a rapport. ‘‘ Duterte remembers
if you were there from the beginning,’’ she says.
‘‘You’re kind of a comfort zone for him.’’ Ranada’s
coverage was among the fi rst to bring national
attention to Duterte’s candidacy, at a time when
Rappler’s reach was expanding rapidly. In January
2016, Rappler sponsored a live debate anchored
by Ressa that every presidential candidate but
(^) Duterte passed on. ‘‘He was charming,’’ Gloria
says. ‘‘He won over the crowd.’’
Ressa harbored no illusions about Duterte’s
affi nity for violence: She had questioned him
while at CNN about the death squad he was
accused of running in Davao City, and she inter-
viewed him again for Rappler in 2015, when he
admitted that he had personally killed three peo-
ple. On the campaign trail, he bragged about his
plans to expand his brutal antidrug crusade to
the national stage. ‘‘The funeral parlors will be
packed,’’ he said during one rally in March 2016.
‘‘I’ll supply the dead bodies.’’ But his charm off en-
sive continued: On May 9, 2016, the day of the
election, Ranada slipped and fell into a dry canal
during one of Duterte’s campaign stops in Davao
City, injuring her foot so badly that she could
barely walk. The candidate accompanied her to
the emergency room and paid her bill. As the
voting pointed to a Duterte victory, Ressa called
him at his campaign headquarters and off ered
her congratulations. ‘‘He said, ‘Ma’am, the results
are not yet offi cial,’ ’’ Gloria says.
Ressa says she was stunned by the speed with
which Duterte’s drug off ensive began. Days after
taking offi ce, he replaced top security offi cials
with loyalists from his home island, and they
dispatched police squads into poor neighbor-
hoods of Manila and into barangays, or villag-
es, throughout the country, ostensibly to make
arrests. More than 300 people were reported
killed in the fi rst month of Duterte’s adminis-
tration. ‘‘I was surprised at the level of impuni-
ty,’’ Ressa says. ‘‘I had assumed that there were
people in government who would say, ‘Stop.’ ’’
In the summer of 2016, with roughly a dozen
corpses turning up in Manila each week, Rappler
began dispatching its reporters into the barri-
os to investigate the killings. The government
line, says Rambo Talabong, then a university stu-
dent and Rappler intern who covered the drug
war, was that ‘‘everybody fought back. A lot of
reporters repeated that narrative, and that’s
44 10.20.19 Photograph by Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times
Pia Ranada, a Rappler political reporter, interviewing Salvador Medialdea, the executive secretary
of the Philippines, in June. She was asked to leave the scene before the president arrived.
DUTERTE REFERS
TO JOURNALISTS
AS ‘SPIES,’
‘VULTURES’ AND
‘LOWLIFES.’ HIS
WISH, HE HAS
SAID, IS TO ‘KILL
JOURNALISM’ IN
THE PHILIPPINES.