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O/C: Freedom of the press in a dangerous world.
Around the world, the number of journalists killed or imprisoned is on the rise. Tonight’s guests, speaking before a live audience at the Clinton Global Initiative, understand these dangers firsthand.
This is Alsu Kurmasheva – finally free – following an historic prisoner swap between Russia the West. The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist endured over six months of detention in Russia on false charges.
KURMASHEVA:I have all this spectrum of emotions right now. There is anger, but it’s, I want to do something.
Maria Ressa is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning co-founder of the online news site Rappler in the Philippines. She has faced harassment and multiple arrests due to her investigative reporting and efforts combating disinformation.
RESSA: This is, by design, set up against facts // And what keeps you scrolling are lies.
Jonathan Munro is the Global News Director of the BBC, leading coverage of high-risk conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza.
MUNRO: Even when there are real personal threats // putting facts into the bloodstream is central to what we do.
With threats to global media freedom increasing, what do these journalists say now?
‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa
and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, and by the following… Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc.
INTERVIEW
HOOVER Maria Ressa, Alsu Kurmasheva, Jonathan Munro. Little live, live action on the phone here. I’m going to start by also disclosing to the audience that I’m on the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. So Alsu. You are a dual US-Russian national. And while you were visiting your sick mother in Russia last year, you were detained by Russian authorities and jailed for supposedly failing to register as a foreign agent and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. You were released alongside Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others in part of a prisoner swap two weeks after your sentencing. The world watched on television as you embraced your children and your husband. How are you adjusting to being back home?
KURMASHEVA Margaret, thank you so much. Less than two months ago, I was in prison, and now I’m here. I’m so happy to be back. I’m so happy to advocate for my colleagues who are in prison now in Crimea and Belarus.And I’m happy to talk about what works here and what needs to be done for safety of journalists.
HOOVER How were you treated in Russian custody?
KURMASHEVA The irony of the whole situation was that they kept me there because I was an American citizen and they treated me as a Russian citizen, and even worse. Other Russian prisoners got access to phone calls and visits from their families, and I was denied that. Fifteen years ago, it was different. Journalists were not imprisoned. Parents had hope for the future of their children. And now it’s different. And imagine it’s 15 years. And if we start doing now and we start education, and we start securing the security of journalists, it might change too. So hope kept me going in prison and hope will keep us going.
HOOVER What you’ve just described is a transformation in media freedom in your home country of Russia in the last 15 years. And Jonathan, I’m going to get to you on this because this is one area where you’re battling on the forefront. But to give it a global perspective, Maria, where do you see media freedom globally now? Is it the worst it has ever been in your lifetime?
RESSA Absolutely. So this is my 38th year as a journalist. We have never lived through anything like this, where– and you haven’t heard this enough here. Big tech, the distribution platform, what connects each of us– Does anyone here not have a cell phone, or is not on social media? Right. This is, by design, set up against facts, against journalists. It literally manipulates your emotions. It hacks our biology. And what keeps you scrolling are lies. This is an MIT 2018 study. I feel like we’re saying this again, right? MIT 2018…
HOOVER Can’t say it too much.
RESSA Lies spread six times faster than facts. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X, do you think it’s better or worse?
HOOVER What’s the answer?
RESSA Worse. But the other part that no one has really talked about is since Elon Musk brought the basement down, brought it down lower, instead of the other big tech companies pulling him up so that the safeguards that were there in 2020 are in place, they followed him down. So Americans are going to vote with less facts, more disinformation, more hate, more fear, more anger, because that is what spreads fastest. You know what we learned in the Philippines, when someone like Rodrigo Duterte says he is going to kill people, and that he’s dumped three bodies in Manila Bay. He actually means it. And when he became president, when he began to lie repeatedly, news organizations like us had to learn to say that’s a lie. It goes against our training as journalists. And that’s the other part. Everything, you know has been turned upside down. It’s quicksand as a journalist.
HOOVER Let me ask you a question as a follow up. And Jonathan, I’m coming to you. Last time I saw you, you were on a book tour in the United States, and many people, many people of authority were concerned that you were returning to the Philippines because they were persuaded, with very good reason, that you would face a 100 year jail sentence, you would spend the rest of your life in prison. You have now said that Duterte, I’m paraphrasing, under Duterte, life was like hell. And now, under Marcos, you’ve moved to purgatory. Is that a silver lining? What happened?
RESSA We now have a president, this is the irony, the only son and namesake of our former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted in a people-power revolt in 1986. Right. He’s now president. He became president in 2022, in May. He cares what the rest of the world thinks. He’s educated in the West. He has to face China, as does the rest of the world. But look, here’s the– It can get better. But here’s what I saw happen in my country. History changed in front of our eyes to elect President Marcos. Those information operations to change the name Marcos from the kleptocrat who stole $10 billion in 1986. In 2014, the metanarrative that was seeded for Marcos was ‘the greatest leader the Philippines has ever known.’ You know, Milan Kundera said the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Social media is not about one post alone. It’s not about content. It’s about saying a lie a million times and making it a fact. So we watched our history change and we elected President Marcos. And he did bring us to purgatory. So thank you.
HOOVER Jonathan, you’re the global news director for the BBC. You’ve journalists operating in warzones, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes around the world, with media freedom shrinking. 71% of the globe now lives under authoritarian rule. You are most concerned about Russia.
MUNRO Yes, we are most concerned about Russia. Thank you for your hope. It’s sometimes quite challenging to have hope when talking about the media in and around Russia. There’ll be plenty of people in this room who will be on the same list as me: banned from Russia because we advocate free media. Our Russian service has had to be sent to work in Latvia in a temporary newsroom in the capital there, Riga. And that’s because the Russians passed legislation a couple of years ago, just after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, to make it illegal for us to report what the Russians describe as misinformation about their armed forces and their government. Now, that definition is in the eye of the beholder, in other words, Russian prosecutors. So having any sort of free media reporting in Russia, particularly if that media is getting to Russians, that is an impossible thing to do if you’re operating in the country. But we still try. We are operating a temporary newsroom which is pursuing investigative journalism. We track, for example, the number of known dead on the Ukrainian front line. That number just ticked over 70,000 Russian soldiers known to have died on the frontline. That number came up last week and we reported that into Russia in Russian on platforms which the Russian population are hungry to hear from, to read, to see. But of course, it’s all illegal. So this is really worrying. Russia is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. So is China. And the advocacy of the outside world for the free media needs to be absolutely relentless in pursuing the case for free journalism, proper investigative reporting globally. And as you rightly say, those figures are going in the wrong direction, not the right direction.
HOOVER What is the number one thing both here in the United States and abroad that can be done? If you had one thing, each of you, to elevate this issue and to fix, and to really begin to fix, what would it be? I’ll start with you Alsu.
KURMASHEVA I would say nobody should take free access to free information and use for granted. People and leaders they should know that it’s a privilege of a free world. It’s a precondition to be free to have an access to the free world. And people should know that there are lots of millions of people are deprived of free information, and it brings to disasters later. That’s what I want to emphasize.
MUNRO There has to be a way of forging a coalition in the free world to enforce the platforms on which misinformation spreads, to take responsibility for the content that they publish. The idea that they’re not publishers, which is a fine definition in law, is frankly nonsense. They are publishers, and they need to be held responsible by the global community, by countries like the U.S. and the U.K. and the rest of the countries in the European Union, where free media is a reality and is part of our democratic accountability. To operate in those countries, those platforms need to be told that responsibility rests with them for what’s on their platforms, and there needs to be a financial penalty of significant magnitude if they breach that.
[Applause]
RESSA You know, it sounds so much better with a British accent. But let me take that forward.
HOOVER Yeah. Please.
RESSA Social media and now generative A.I., the technology that is ruining our lives, is running our lives, is not based on facts. None of it. I’ve had several deep fakes now. The first one was done by a Russian scam network.
HOOVER Explain it.
RESSA A deep fake is generative A.I.-created. It looks like you, sounds like you, but isn’t you, right? You’ve seen some of these things already. My first one was soon after OpenAI rolled out Chat GPT and I was– It came from Russia. We traced it. It was a Russian scam network and I was selling crypto.
FAKE VIDEO: This is the biggest opportunity I’ve seen in my entire life to make a big fortune quickly.
RESSA I don’t sell crypto.
HOOVER If only.
RESSA Crypto right then what. I had CFOs and CTOs and CEOs calling me from the Philippines saying tell us about this. No. So deep fake. You know you know about the Hong Kong company where he was the guy, the treasurer, was on a call, a Zoom call with four different people. And they told him to wire $25 million from Hong Kong to London. Every single one of the four on that Zoom call were deep fakes and they lost $25 million. Right. So I think the first is, you know, definitely these tech companies– and a lot of them, they’re American, Silicon Valley driven. And TikTok– It’s funny that America took action against TikTok, but not against the original sins. Because this is part of the reason 71% of the world is electing illiberal leaders democratically is because they believe it.
HOOVER And yet you support the TikTok legislation.
RESSA I support anything that holds the platforms accountable.
HOOVER OK.
RESSA I have been saying this, because that’s the medium term. This is not a free speech issue. If you think it’s a free speech issue, most of the time that probably comes from a tech lobby. Four out of ten Americans now get their information from social media. So where you get your information determines how you see the world, how you feel and how you act, meaning how you vote. Right. When will these tech companies take responsibility for that? So I believe in that. And then the other part is I’m tired of begging for facts, of begging the big tech companies who, by the way, are making $300 billion a year, a billion, 300 billion, not million. One percent to news organizations would help. But, you know, if they were to do that and restore facts, then we would stop being manipulated. Because guess what? It’s not just your– It’s not just the people who want to make money here or who want power here. It’s China, Iran, Russia and the information warfare that Americans are being subjected to. And it is off the scale right now. So the last thing I would add is we need– news organizations in the global south need help in this time period, i.e. money. News organizations are not going to survive this. Women are not going to survive this. Whether you’re a journalist, an activist, or a leader or a politician. We are under attack. Sorry.
[applause]
HOOVER So, Jonathan, Alsu, perhaps you’ll want to comment on this. You know, it sounds like what your, your solution then is in the legislative bodies of Western nations to legislate or to form some kind of guardrails.
MUNRO I think that’s right. But let’s be clear, we believe in free speech. We’re not trying to legislate away from free speech. Quite the contrary. We believe in opinions. We believe in scrutiny. We believe in open access to media. But when you have a situation as we had in the U.K. this summer where there were significant number of riots around towns in England because of a false claim on one social media platform that it was an asylum seeker who had caused the death of some children when it was not, he was not an asylum seeker.
RESSA X.
MUNRO Yes. He had no connection with the asylum process at all. But that triggered a significant amount of damage and injury across a significant number of communities. That is not free speech. That’s just untrue. And so legislators need to work on how enforceable a new regime would be. And you know what, I think that the vast majority of people who consume social media would support that if it’s done well. Because nobody wants to be looking at their phone, not knowing whether they can trust what they’re reading or not. But this is becoming an urgent problem. This is no longer a problem that’s ten years away. This is a problem that’s happening right now.
HOOVER Alsu, the organization to which you belong, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, unlike broadcasting in Western democracies, has a deep and rich tradition of broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain, and even today broadcasts and operates in 23 countries in 27 languages, mostly in Central Asia and in places where there is decidedly shrinking media freedom.
KURMASHEVA And it’s dangerous. My colleagues are under danger constantly. We deliver news and information to the countries where people don’t have access to news and information and independent news information. And we journalists, we rely on the institutions, on legislations of the free world. And any detained journalist should be designated, wrongfully detained immediately by, not only by the United States, but all other free countries. And an attack on any journalist in any country is a personal attack, professional attack on all of us. This is how we consider it. This is how we see it. And when journalists are wrongfully detained, we rely on the free world to release journalists and to help them later.
HOOVER I would be remiss not to mention your colleagues are in prison now, Andrey Kuznechyk in Belarus and also, in Russian occupied Crimea, Vladyslav Yesypenko has been in prison for multiple years. What is your message to us in the free world, to your colleagues who are in prison? What can help them? And how do we expedite their releases?
KURMASHEVA I can share what helped me. I knew I had such a tremendous support. And when I was released, I realized that I knew only ten percent of that. And when I came back, I was left speechless at the scale of the campaign. We can continue doing so for my colleagues, too. And they will get that information. One way or another, they will know that we support them, that we remember about them, and we are trying our best to help them to be free.
MUNRO Can I just add, it’s also families. In the case, for example, of the Iranian authorities who persecute the families of people working on Persian language media, including BBC Persian. BBC Persian operates out of London because there’s simply no way of doing it in Iran. But their families, their extended families are routinely interrogated by the police and security forces in Iran. It’s an outrage. And despite significant lobbying, literally no improvement has been seen in that situation. So the designation can’t be limited to the people who happen to carry a nice badge saying they’re a journalist. It’s the whole community that supports journalism.
RESSA And to add to that one, you know, I am lucky compared to a lot of our other colleagues who are in prison. But, you know, the Committee to Protect Journalists, RSF, Reporters Without Borders, and ICFJ, the International Center for Journalists, actually created this coalition, brought in 84 different media freedom groups, and you guys were part of it. You know, this helped. I don’t know if I would be here in front of you if we didn’t have that kind of help. And it is both before you go to jail, during, and then I think the other part, we were talking about this backstage, right, your anger, suppressed anger, comes out after the crisis, I think, even after.
KURMASHEVA I was so surprised to hear the same thing from Maria. I controlled my feelings and emotions when I was in prison because I wouldn’t have helped myself there. And I felt no anger. I felt no desperation. I was just hopeful, or I was falling apart. And, but when I came back, I have all this spectrum of emotions right now. There is anger, but it’s, I want to do something. And I’m emotional. Every time I see someone, I want to hug. And Margaret, we gave each other so many hugs backstage. A whole spectrum of good and bad emotions. But I will make them work now.
HOOVER The United States was slow to designate you, to give you the designation that you deserved as wrongfully detained. You receive that designation, finally, when you were on the plane coming home. That designation helps, even still.
KURMASHEVA Yeah, it helped.
HOOVER However, what do we need to do in the United States to support journalists who are imprisoned and to support media freedom abroad?
KURMASHEVA To keep our stories in the spotlight, to build solidarity and cooperation between journalists. You know, we journalists, journalism and media community, we are competitive and we have to be. But when it comes to safety, we have to unite and show solidarity. This was my case. This was Evan Gershkovich’s case. And I believe this will be the case when it comes to other journalists. It doesn’t matter what media outlet they are from, which country they are from, we have to be united.
HOOVER Final thoughts from each of you. And Maria, I’d like to tee you because you have an insight about influencers and journalists and the role they play on social media and how little the public knows or can discern between the two.
RESSA Yeah. The corruption that plays out as autocracy or kleptocracy globally right now starts with our information ecosystem. I became a journalist because information is power. That power is being turned against the cellular level of every democracy, which is the citizens. So stop the factory of lies. When you stop the factory of lies, you stop the manipulation of people. Journalists, we go there. We risk our lives, we risk our safety, but the incentive structure is upside down. So please be aware. And we got to do more. We have to move away from the virtual world into the physical world and demand better.
HOOVER Jonathan, there’s a famous old Radio Free Radio Liberty interview with James Buckley when he was on Fire, the original Firing Line with William F. Buckley.
JAMES BUCKLEY: We cannot incite to riot, to revolt, but we have an obligation to report the truth, and that we try to do to the best of our knowledge.
SHAKESPEARE: Mr. Kramer–
BUCKLEY: Even if you know that the truth is combustible, do you nevertheless report it unvarnished?
JAMES BUCKLEY: Yes.
SHAKESPEARE: Does the Washington Post?
BUCKLEY: Well, the answer is yes.
SHAKESPEARE: Yes, of course, and that ‘s our answer also.
BUCKLEY: But don ‘t you recognize that there are certain limitations built in as a result of the fact that you are broadcasting to people who aren’t permitted to react the way people who read the Washington Post do and should react?
JAMES BUCKLEY: We are operating on the basis that human beings are entitled to facts . It is up to those individuals how they will react to those facts.
MUNRO Yeah, the facts. There’s no such thing as alternative facts. Facts are facts. But as Alsu said earlier, I think it’s really important that we hold onto this. There is hope, right? We work in an industry of trade which is crucial to the DNA of the wider world. And facts are part of that. The distribution of facts, the challenging of things that are not factual, the labeling of things that are deliberately put out there despite the fact that they’re not true, that is very important. We’ve also got to hold our nerve. We’ve got to be willing, keen, eager to scrutinize, to call people to account, to make ourselves unpopular with governments and authorities around the world. And in the words of George Orwell, to capitalize on the liberty we’ve got by telling people things they don’t want to hear. If we pull back from that mission, we will be failing ourselves. So however hard that it is, however difficult and challenging that can be, even when there are real personal threats, organizations like the BBC and others who are represented in this room and on this stage, we are there to support that. And putting facts into the bloodstream is central to what we do.
KURMASHEVA We are very hopeful to have professional journalists around us who do professional, fact-based, fact checked job. And that’s very crucial. That’s important for the free world.
HOOVER Alsu, Jonathan, Maria Ressa, thank you for being here. Thank you for standing for media freedom, and thank you all for joining us.