JOIN USNobel: An affirmation of journalism’s role today
The award of this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace to two journalists who have practised free and independent journalism in authoritarian regimes is an affirmation of the fact that freedom begets peace and lack of freedom creates strife and turmoil. The Nobel committee has awarded the prize to Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia “for their efforts to safeguard the freedom of expression, which is a precondition for safeguarding democracy and peace.” It is an acknowledgement of the role of free press in a democratic society. These linkages are sometimes lost and often distorted and misrepresented by those who have a vested interest in denial of freedom. So, the narrative is made that freedom creates chaos which leads to strife and disruption of peace. But the historical experiences of societies and lessons from the working of both democratic and authoritarian systems prove that it is a false narrative, and that it is freedom that holds societies peacefully together and it is its absence that creates strife and war.
Ressa and Muratov live and practise their profession in countries where governments wield absolute power, but both have shown great courage and commitment to the best traditions and values of journalism for many years. Ressa founded the news portal Rappler in 2012 which has published many reports about rights violations and arbitrary killings in the country and has criticised President Rodrigo Duterte and his government for them. Muratov is the editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1993 and has been a trenchant critic of the Vladimir Putin regime. Journalists have been persecuted, punished and killed in both countries for exposing the crimes, corruption and misconduct of those in government and their cronies. Ressa has faced criminal charges, investigations and online attacks. She is on bail after being convicted in a libel case. Many journalists in Russia have been jailed and killed, some of them from Muratov’s paper.
Both Ressa and Muratov have dedicated their Prize to journalists who have been killed and others who take great risks and write and speak against authority, living dangerously. Journalists have not won a Nobel Prize in the past for practising their profession. So, as Ressa put it, it is “a recognition of the difficulties, but also hopefully of how we’re going to win the battle for truth”. Speaking truth to power is important in a world where falsehood and fake news are created and promoted by those in authority. But journalism is threatened and endangered the world over, even in democracies, and ironically that creates an environment in which it can make itself more relevant and achieve excellence. Again, as Ressa said, it gives journalists a chance to assert that “we hold the line”.