Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To Journalist With NJ Ties

TOMS RIVER, NJ — Maria Ressa, a journalist in the Philippines who has spent the last 30 years challenging dictators and governments in Southeast Asia, has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ressa, a 1982 Toms River High School North and 1986 Princeton University graduate, and Dmitry Muratov, a Russian journalist, were chosen “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” Nobel Prize officials said.

"Without media, you cannot have a strong democracy," said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which announced the honor Friday.

“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda. The Norwegian Nobel Committee is convinced that freedom of expression and freedom of information help to ensure an informed public,” the Nobel Committee said.

“These rights are crucial prerequisites for democracy and protect against war and conflict. The award of the 2021 #NobelPeacePrize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov is intended to underscore the importance of protecting and defending these fundamental rights,” the committee said.

Muratov, one of the founders of the independent newspaper Novaja Gazeta in 1993, “has for decades defended freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions,” the committee said.

Ressa is the CEO of Rappler, a digital news site she co-founded in the Phillippines in 2012 that is fighting for press freedom and has been persistently focused on Phillippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “murderous anti-drug campaign.”

Ressa, who turned 58 on Oct. 2, has been working as a journalist in Asia for 35 years. She starting CNN's Manila Bureau, which she ran for almost 10 years before opening the network's Jakarta Bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. She focused on investigating terrorism and wrote two books, "Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda's Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia" and "From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism." She also was included in Time's 2018 Person of the Year edition.

Her reporting in the Philippines on President Rodrigo Duterte has landed her in jail several times, and Rappler's work is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, "A Thousand Cuts," which can be seen on the PBS website.

The path to peace is facts, Ressa said in an interview on Rappler after the Nobel announcement. (You can watch the video below.)

"We are fighting for facts," she said. "We live in a world where facts are debatable, where the world's largest distributor of news prioritizes the spread of lies laced with anger and hate and spreads it faster and further than facts."

"Nothing is possible without facts. Even though facts are really boring, everything begins with a shared reality that is defined by facts," Ressa said. "When you attack the media oftentimes it's about shooting the messenger."

Ressa, who was born in the Philippines, says her time in the United States and in the Toms River schools set her on the path to the work she does today.

Ressa’s family had come to the United States in 1973 to escape the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who had declared martial law a year earlier. She spoke mostly a version of Tagalog then.

She attended Silver Bay Elementary School, and in an interview with Patch earlier this year, said she remembers struggling to understand the English being spoken around her.

“I was so sad,” Ressa said. It was piano lessons with Mrs. Rankin, arranged by Toms River orchestra director Don Spaulding, that helped her bridge the language gaps and feel more comfortable.

From the piano, she learned strings and played the violin in the orchestra through high school. At Toms River North, she also sang in the chorus and took part in the theatre club. She played basketball and softball, and was president of her class for three years, all while taking AP classes.

“That was how we socialized, the extracurriculars,” Ressa said.

“Public school systems are incredibly important,” Ressa said. “Toms River was like exploration. You find your friends. If you're a nerd you learn it's OK to be a nerd.” And all of the activities and classes she had at Toms River North prepared her for college.

“It allowed me to enter this different world at Princeton,” Ressa said. At Princeton “I fell into journalism,” and after graduation took a Fulbright fellowship opportunity to return to the Philippines, where the People Power revolt, had thrown Ferdinand Marcos out of power.

From there, the rest has been history. At age 40, she made the decision to stay in the Philippines for good, fighting to hold dictators to account there and in many of the Southeast Asian countries, where Rappler actively reports on the news and frequently runs afoul of authorities.

Ressa said it was public school where she learned to stand her ground.

“The Toms River schools system did that for me,” Ressa said. “You learn how to deal with bullies.”

She also learned that part of the key to holding bullies accountable is “you have to have people who will stand up for you against these bullies.” That is what she sees her role is as a journalist, to stand up for others, she said.

Ressa said she has stepped back from an active reporting role, and now spends much of her time dealing with the legal challenges that the Duterte government throws her way. The day she spoke with Patch, she was preparing for court in a cyber libel case the government had filed against her over reporting she had done eight years earlier on Duterte’s regime and the anti-drug campaign. That campaign has included “death squads,” she said, that executed people on the charge that they are using drugs. Thousands of people were killed, she said.

Rappler’s reporting has led to a probe by the International Criminal Court into the death squads.

"My job is to hold up the sky so my team can keep doing investigative journalism," she said.

The arrests and the court battles have not deterred her work, however. She has written a book on the experience, "How to Stand Up to a Dictator," that is due out in July 2022.

“You just keep walking through the bad times to get to the good times,” she said. "We're not going to back down."

When she was called by the Nobel committee Friday morning, her response: "I'm speechless!"

"I'm just a journalist who is doing my job," she said after she was nominated in February.

"When you don't have facts, you don't have truth, you don't have trust. Trust is what holds us together to be able to solve the complex problems our world is facing today," she said Friday in the interview on Rappler.

Hear her reaction to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: The call from Oslo.

Hear Maria Ressa’s reaction when she hears the news from Olav Njølstad, Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, on being awarded the 2021 #NobelPeacePrize just before the public announcement. "I'm speechless!"
#NobelPrize @mariaressa pic.twitter.com/Zxy20nzWvd
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2021

While Ressa has made her home permanently in the Philippines, her parents and several family members have remained in the United States. In July 2019, she returned to the U.S. and visited Toms River, including the schools she attended, and participated in a memorial orchestra concert to honor Don Spaulding, the orchestra teacher who arranged the piano lessons.

"Toms River has changed, but it felt the same," she said. "There are all these little memories, safe memories."

She reflected at length on her time in the Toms River schools in an essay she wrote for Rappler in 2019 after her visit. You can read it here.

The film goes back to Toms River, NJ, where I played violin again for the first time in a very long time to commemorate a teacher who helped shape my life. Pls don't laugh at my high school photos https://t.co/09U2MuFDSs https://t.co/yYyIQdSAD7
— Maria Ressa (@mariaressa) January 10, 2021

Note: This has been updated with comments from Ressa on being honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.

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