Time magazine announced its Person of the Year on Tuesday, 11 December, honouring slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and making it the first time that a deceased person has been named Person of the Year.
Honouring ‘The Guardians and the War on Truth”, Time magazine named slain, imprisoned and targeted individuals and organisations for staying true to reporting the truth in times of misinformation, free speech restrictions, and the rise of despots globally.
The others named were 55-year-old Filipino journalist Maria Ressa who chronicled the violent drug war and extra-judicial killings by President Duterte and whose website has been charged with tax fraud; staff of the Capital newspaper, that witnessed a mass shooting earlier in June and still put out an edition the following morning; and Reuters reporters Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone who are looking at seven years in prison for documenting the deaths of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
An excerpt from Time’s piece on their Person of the Year:
“This ought to be a time when democracy leaps forward, an informed citizenry being essential to self-government. Instead, it’s in retreat. Three decades after the Cold War defeat of a blunt and crude autocracy, a more clever brand takes nourishment from the murk that surrounds us. The old-school despot embraced censorship. The modern despot, finding that more difficult, foments mistrust of credible fact, thrives on the confusion loosed by social media and fashions the illusion of legitimacy from supplicants.”
Maria Ressa, Philippines
Time writes about Ressa:
“A 55-year-old woman named Maria Ressa steers Rappler, an online news site she helped found, through a superstorm of the two most formidable forces in the information universe: social media and a populist President with authoritarian inclinations.”
She has been named for chronicling the drug war and extra-judicial killings under President Duterte’s regime in the Philippines that has left 12,000 dead, according to an estimate from Human Rights Watch.
In November, the Duterte administration charged Rappler with tax fraud, that could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years.
Staff of the Capital Gazette, USA
Time writes:
“‘I can tell you this,’ declared Chase Cook, a reporter for the Capital Gazette. ‘We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.’ Cook’s promise, shared with the world on Twitter, came just a few hours after five of his colleagues were killed.”
The staff of the Capital Gazette refused to be silenced by the deaths of their colleagues in the newsroom when a gunman attacked them. They still brought out the newspaper the following day but left the Opinion page blank in memory of their slain co-workers.
Time notes, “Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines, never more than this year.”
Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone, Myanmar
Imprisoned in Myanmar, two young Reuters reporters, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone are serving a sentence for documenting the deaths of 10 Rohingya Muslims, a minority. They were sentenced to seven years in prison, while the killers they exposed got ten years.
Other Examples
Time further wrote:
“This year brought no shortage of other examples. Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam was jailed for more than 100 days for making “false” and “provocative” statements after criticizing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in an interview about mass protests in Dhaka. In Sudan, freelance journalist Amal Habani was arrested while covering economic protests, detained for 34 days and beaten with electric rods. In Brazil, reporter Patricia Campos Mello was targeted with threats after reporting that supporters of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro had funded a campaign to spread false news stories on WhatsApp. And Victor Mallet, Asia news editor for the Financial Times, was forced out of Hong Kong after inviting an activist to speak at a press club event against the wishes of the Chinese government.”
“Worldwide, a record number of journalists—262 in total—were imprisoned in 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expects the total to be high again this year.”
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