Carmina and Patch fan-girl over their pick for International Women's Day 2023. They discuss Maria Ressa's genius, both in journalism and more. Join them as they #holdtheline with Maria Ressa.
To learn more: HOW TO STAND UP TO A DICTATOR: THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE, Nobel Prize lecture: Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize 2021, The Nobel Prize: Maria Ressa Facts, A Thousand Cuts (full documentary) | FRONTLINE, International Women’s Day 2023, Maria Ressa on tax evasion acquittal: ‘Today, facts win, truth wins, justice wins’, TIME: Person of the Year 2018, From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center, The Energizer Bunny of Nobel Laureates, Recollections of Maria Ressa During Our HS Years, Journalist Maria Ressa explains ‘How To Stand Up to a Dictator, and Who Is Maria Ressa and What is Rappler?
To support FilTrip, go to the Patreon page here and PayPal page here.
Visit https://filtrip.buzzsprout.com. Drop a note at thefiltrip@gmail.com.
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Carmina and Patch fan-girl over their pick for International Women's Day 2023. They discuss Maria Ressa's genius, both in journalism and more. Join them as they #holdtheline with Maria Ressa.
To learn more: HOW TO STAND UP TO A DICTATOR: THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE, Nobel Prize lecture: Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize 2021, The Nobel Prize: Maria Ressa Facts, A Thousand Cuts (full documentary) | FRONTLINE, International Women’s Day 2023, Maria Ressa on tax evasion acquittal: ‘Today, facts win, truth wins, justice wins’, TIME: Person of the Year 2018, From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center, The Energizer Bunny of Nobel Laureates, Recollections of Maria Ressa During Our HS Years, Journalist Maria Ressa explains ‘How To Stand Up to a Dictator, and Who Is Maria Ressa and What is Rappler?
To support FilTrip, go to the Patreon page here and PayPal page here.
Visit https://filtrip.buzzsprout.com. Drop a note at thefiltrip@gmail.com.
Thanks to FilTrip's sponsor SOLEPACK. Visit thesolepack.com for more details.
See https://www.buzzsprout.com/privacy for Privacy Policy.
Welcome to FilTrip, a podcast where we explore everything fun, weird, and in between about the Philippines. And now a quick shout out. Check out Manila Candle. Manila Candle features Filipino inspired scents like Tagaytay, Palawan, Ube Halaya and Buco and Mango. They also have fun ones like Ay Nako and Bahala Ka Sa Buhay Mo.
Patch:Enjoy their car fresheners, wax melts and merchandise to visit manilacandle.com and take a trip to the Philippines through their scents.
Carmina:Back to our show.
Patch:Today's trip is a holiday trip when we talk about a specific holiday observance festival or celebration, and our personal experiences with that holiday. Today we'll be talking about International Women's Day, which is celebrated on March 8th.
Carmina:This day is not an official holiday here in the us, but here are just some of a few countries that do celebrate it. Afghanistan, Armenia, Cambodia, China, but for women only. Cuba, Georgia, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam, Zambia, and in many other countries. So obviously the Philippines and the US are missing from that list. However, in the Philippines, a Republic Act was signed in 1990, which is an act to declare March 8th of every year as a working special holiday to be known as National Women's Day. It was signed by President Cory Aquino on April 10th, 1990. This law strengthened the impetus for the celebration by an enjoining employees from the government and private sector to participate in activities conducted by their offices. So I thought that was nice,
Patch:Very significant that it was President Aquino who signed that being the first female president.
Carmina:On a global level. Though this year's theme for International Women's Day is#EmbraceEquity. So I encourage everyone to look at their website because it does have a lot of resources for people who want to learn and mobilize.
Patch:Carmina. Who did we pick as our feature for our episode of International Women's Day?
Carmina:Drum roll, please. We picked Maria Ressa. We just thought that she embodied all of the things that International Women's Day is supposed to represent, and more. As we know, she was awarded the Nobel Peace P rize in 2021, alongside another journalist, Dmitry Muratov from Russia, f or their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting p eace. She's only the 18th woman who has ever received a Nobel Prize. So in her speech, she says, and I quote,"gender disinformation is a new threat and is t aking a significant toll on the mental health and physical safety of women, girls, trans and LGBT people all around the world. Women journalists are at the epicenter of the risk. This pandemic of misogyny and hatred needs to be tackled now." And P atch, I didn't know this, but she was also one of the Guardians, which was what Time Magazine called the many people who were honored a s T ime P erson of the Year in 2018. The Guardians is what t ime called those journalists who were violently attacked or unjustly handed criminal charges to silence press freedom. Maria Ressa was one of the people singled out by time. Maria said that being a war correspondent was easier compared to what she was facing t hen and now.
Patch:Time Magazine awarded her because of her courage and work on disinformation and what we call now fake news.
Carmina:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Patch:She was also among its 100 most influential people of 2019 and one of Time's most influential women of the century.
Carmina:So we don't need any more justification<laugh> for why we picked her today.<laugh>. So how did you first hear about her Patch?
Patch:For me, it was really quite recent. It was during the elections because of Rappler, the news outlet that she founded.
Carmina:For me, it was through her documentary A Thousand Cuts. I watched it sometime in 2020, and I remember right after I watched it sending it to as many family and friends here in the US because if you recall, that was a really important year for us here. We were entering election year, and I was very concerned that a certain candidate was going to win again. So in every text that I sent, I kind of gave a warning. I really urged people to watch it because I felt a lot of the things that she was saying there was very relevant to us. Did you watch it Patch?
Patch:I watched it in YouTube.<laugh>. We laugh about it, but I'm very glad that it is available there.
Carmina:And we're going to link it in our show notes as well. Right. So the idea for the title is to convey how lies start as small paper cuts that you ignore, but then eventually you bleed out from them because there are just so many. And it's a documentary that follows Maria Ressa as she exposes not just disinformation in the Philippines, but also so fascinating patch that she was able to actually map out the architecture of this information. It begins with how Maria Ressa and Rappler exposed the Duterte war on drugs was actually a war on the poor. She and her journalists constantly challenged his administration. As a result, within the first year of Duterte's administration, the government issued ten arrest warrants against Theresa and Rappler.
Patch:It's significant to note that it was ten arrest warrants against her in less than two years. So that was a lot in a very short period of time.
Carmina:While she was struggling and fighting through all that, it was really fascinating to see how hard she and the journalists at Rappler work to really map out and deconstruct how Duterte won the election and how it can be used at scale over and over anywhere in the world.
Patch:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>,
Carmina:And the line that really got me and caught my attention right away was when she said they test the tactics of how to manipulate America in the Philippines, and if it works, they poured it over there to the rest of the world that they, that she was talking about was Facebook and later Cambridge Analytica. She first brought that to light through this documentary before it even broke in the global news.
Patch:Sometime in 2017. She was one of about a dozen startup founders who met with Mark Zuckerberg. She was trying to get him to see how powerful Facebook has become in the country, because 97% of Filipinos who were online were on Facebook.
Carmina:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Patch:And she gave a very funny anecdote. She said that when she mentioned that number to him, he frowned and she thought that, oh, you know, she must have been a little too pushy. He replied something like, where's the other 3%? He, he was so focused on not getting 100% on essentially profit.
Carmina:We were talking about the many, many lawsuits against Maria Ressa and Rappler. But one of the first accusations against her and Rappler was the characterization that it was not Filipino owned and it was controlled by American run propaganda. And you know, on this point, Maria Ressa was an easy target because she is a Filipino American. She didn't start out in life as Maria Ressa. Her full name was Maria Angelita Aycardo. She was born on October 2nd, 1963, and unfortunately, her father, Phil Aycardo, died at 25 years old when she was only one, and her mother was pregnant with her sister. Up to that point, they were living with her father's family. She doesn't go into details, but it seems there was conflict between her mom and her father's family because her mom left the household. When her father died, they ended up living with her great-grandmother and what she described as so poor that they had to brush their teeth with salt and didn't know when they were going to eat their next meal.
Patch:I didn't realize that that was, you know, part of her childhood experience.
Carmina:I know, right? And then when she was five, there was family drama and it resulted in her mother moving to the US without them. From that time on, she and her sister lived with their father's parents.
Patch:Until the age of nine, she lived with her paternal grandmother.
Carmina:Guess where they lived Patch?
Patch:Where?
Carmina:Time Street in Quezon City.
Patch:Okay.
Carmina:Do you remember last episode we talked about Ninoy Aquino living on Time Street?
Patch:Oh my gosh, yes.
Carmina:She moved there in 1969, and as we talked about last episode, Ninoy didn't get imprisoned until 1972 when Martial Law was declared. So Maria says that while her grandmother was instrumental in shaping her values and faith and hard work, she was unfortunately also being told by her grandmother that her mom wasn't any good to the point of telling her that her mom went to the US to become a prostitute.
Patch:My goodness. So she was already a victim of disinformation and fake news<laugh> since a very young child.
Carmina:<laugh>. It's a very good point,<laugh>. I didn't even look at it from that perspective, but you are so right. And also, I can't even imagine how conflicted she must have felt, especially since her mom did come back from the US to visit once a year. And she described those visits as really chaotic because she had to constantly navigate between managing her grandmother and her mother at the same time. That must have been such a difficult position to put a child in.
Patch:Absolutely.
Carmina:Patch.
Patch:Yes.
Carmina:Not to mooch on Maria Ressa's great reputation, but...<laugh>.
Patch:Let's do it. Let's mooch.
Carmina:<laugh>. Do you know we have something in common with her? I bought her book, and there's a picture on the first chapter of her book. Let me show it to you.
Patch:I recognize the uniform.
Carmina:To our listeners. I'm holding up to Patch, the class photo of Maria Ressa in 1973, and she's wearing a very familiar uniform that Patch and I wore for many, many years. Patch, a nd was so amazing to read her describe our school. And then she also talked about her best friend there named T wink Macaraig.
Patch:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Carmina:Sadly though, that period of her life ended so suddenly in 1973, and again, note the date, it was only a year after Martial Law was declared. At that point, she was ten years old. And the reason I was so fascinated with this aspect of her life is because her mom kidnapped her and her sister from the school to bring them to the US.
Patch:What?
Carmina:Yeah. So that's how deep the drama was between her paternal grandparents and her mom was that her mom had to kidnap her and her sister. Not that I'm encouraging kidnapping, but...
Patch:<laugh>,
Carmina:Remember how we were talking about how the nuns in our school were so progressive and modern in their thinking?
Patch:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>,
Carmina:Apparently two nuns helped her mom, the principal, and a teacher.
Patch:Oh, wow! It's like a movie.
Carmina:It really is, isn't it? For them to have helped her mom there probably really was a good reason.
Patch:Well, it was basically saving her from a situation that she didn't need to be in.
Carmina:They arrived in the US. She lived with her mom's stepfather and a baby step sister in Tom's River in New Jersey. She would have two other half-siblings, a brother and another little sister. Her stepfather adopted her and her sister. So from Maria Angelita Aycardo, she became Maria Angelita Ressa. She described her parents as really hardworking and dedicated to the family. In one part of the book, she tells how when she was going to high school, her dad went to college at night and her mom was similarly hardworking, saving everything she had for the kids.
Patch:Her parents worked in New York City, but insisted that Maria and her siblings go to school at Tom's River because they valued the education that they would get there. It was such a sacrifice for her parents to drive almost two hours each way just so they would get the most out of their education.
Carmina:She described how she stood out when she started school. She said that she was the smallest and the only brown person. In spite of that, she really excelled and was very advanced. So much so that she was put in a higher grade within a few months of starting. I mean, she was really obviously dare I say a genius<laugh>.
Patch:Yeah.
Carmina:She was pre-med in Princeton, and she finished all her requirements for med school in two years. And in this part of the book, she talks about how she internalized Princeton's honor code pledge. It says,"I pledge my honor that I have not violated the honor code during this examination." Could you have said that with a straight face While we were in school, Patch.
Patch:<laugh> I, I plead the fifth.
Carmina:<laugh>. I do the same. After she graduated from Princeton, she must have had a lot of job offers, but she applied for a Fulbright Fellowship. When she got the scholarship, she used the funding to go back to the Philippines. After 13 years of being away, one of her big objectives was to reunite with her grandmother. But unfortunately, that reunion she described was really sad because her grandmother still harbored ill feelings for her mom, and that's really where she left it in the book. I guess there wasn't a really deep reconnection.
Patch:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Carmina:She also reunited with her best friend from grade school, Twink.
Patch:Oh, yay! Twink.
Carmina:And from this moment, Twink would be a huge influence in the trajectory of her life. It was Twink who introduced her to broadcast journalism. By this time Cory was president. She was there during the early years of Cory's presidency and actually went through the six coup attempts that we talked about at the last episode. It was during the sixth coup attempt that she worked with Che Che Lazaro, who was a top executive and anchor woman at ABS CBN.
Patch:From there, she worked for CNN as well, which was at that time only about seven years old. It was a new network. They hired her as a reporter and as part of her job, she covered the seventh coup attempt against Cory. She had a really prolific career at CNN, and at one time was a war correspondent for its Southeast Asian news desk and lived in Jakarta. So she went back to the Philippines in 2005 when ABS CBN challenged her to turn it into a world-class news organization. While there, she faced tough opposition from various Presidents because of how she chose to lead her team and the news that they delivered. One of the, the most challenging was then President Gloria Macapagal Aroyo. Because of the many scandals and events that happened during her presidency,
Carmina:Her career ended at ABS CBN because of a controversy. This is a blast from the past Patch. Do you remember Noel de Castro?
Patch:Yes.
Carmina:So when we were growing up, he was a famous news anchor, but I didn't know that he actually became Gloria Macapagal's VP.
Patch:I didn't know that either.<laugh>,
Carmina:That's how checked out we were, I guess.
Patch:Yeah, I guess
Carmina:So. After his stint as a vp, he was trying to get back into ABS CBN, and Maria kept blocking him because of her belief that he lacked the journalistic integrity directly related to what she experienced during that administration. And I think that that's valid. Right?
Patch:Right.
Carmina:However, in the end, her decision was overturned. The way she described it, it was an amicable parting, and she left with the understanding of the business pressures that led to that decision. So she left in 2010. In 2012, she co-founded Rappler because she wanted to mesh the power of the internet with the news. She was a self-proclaimed truest of believers in social media at first. Until she learned how it helped spread disinformation. And in both the documentary a nd the book, she goes through so much data and detail about how Facebook and other social media platforms are being used to spread disinformation. She described this as a species w ide peer pressure, likening it to high school on a global scale. And because of this work, she is c redited by journalists all over the world for helping spread awareness of this phenomenon.
Patch:It's really impressive how innovative Rappler was at that time. There wasn't Facebook Live or any platform similar to it. Usually it would cost a lot of money to buy technology to run, news live at the site. So they created a van that cost very little money to go live anywhere in the Philippines using internet protocol, which that time was not widely used.
Carmina:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Patch:She knew the potential for social media and what that means to journalism and social change, even when a lot of people, or a lot of journalists I think weren't really looking into it. So she was really a was a pioneer.
Carmina:And she really is also a very talented writer. There are several memorable quotes from her book. Even in the prologue, she hits you with lines that are gut punches.<laugh>. The first line that got me was when she described the outcome of the last presidential elections. She says,"this is how it ends. Facts lost, history lost. Marcos won."
Patch:Oh, goosebumps.
Carmina:<laugh>. So many goosebumps moments.
Patch:Recently she published How to Stand Up To A Dictator, but this is not her first book. Her first one was in 2011 titled Seeds Of Terror, An Eyewitness Account Of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center, where she writes about how their tactics shifted after nine 11. Then she had another one in 2013 titled from Bin Laden to Facebook, Ten Days Of Abduction, Ten Years Of Terrorism. It's about how two most wanted terrorists went to the Philippines and somehow managed to keep their families and networks updated through Facebook. Maria connects the spread of training camps from Afghanistan and the Philippines, and also talks about how social networks spread ideologies.
Carmina:Okay. Patch. Even though Maria was pre-med in Princeton, she discovered her love of the arts and theater. She even acted and was in a playwriting class. While she was in Princeton, though she was oblivious to what was happening in the Philippines and wasn't really interested even in U S politics. But, when she was writing a play as her senior thesis in 1986, that was around when People Power happened, and that's how she reconnected to it. Her play was a meshing of her own personal struggles about her past and the political developments in the Philippines. There was a grandmother who was a play on Marcos. This character was fighting a Cory A quino figure who was fighting for custody of her child, and the child represented both her and the Filipino people. So when this play was shown in Princeton, her parents were in the audience, and when the lights came up, she and her parents were crying because of the very deep connection i t had on their personal story.
Patch:I'm hoping that this play will somehow find its way in theaters again.
Carmina:Yeah! Especially since it even played at the Edinborough Festival, French a nd Scotland. Oh, wow. So I really want to get my hands on this script. And then another one that's arts r elated. W hile she was working for CNN i n Manila, she directed musical concerts.
Patch:What?
Carmina:Some of the artists that she worked with were Janet Basco, Jose Marie Chan!
Patch:Oh!
Carmina:And Ariel Rivera.
Patch:Honestly, can she stop<laugh>?
Carmina:I know, right? Spread the talent, please.
Patch:<laugh>. Okay. Carmina. So I also always wondered what her um, status is. Is she single? So Maria is gay, and in her book she talks about when she was at a crossroads about her sexuality. She had an American boyfriend who came to Manila every few months to live with her. But when he asked her to marry him, she realized that she wasn't in love. She realized she was gay when she fell in love with her first girlfriend at the age of 30.
Carmina:So Patch, we already talked about her best friend, Twink, but there are other women whom Maria credits for Rappler success. She co-founded it with equally smart and dedicated women whose names are Chay Hofileña, Glenda Gloria, and Beth Frondosoo.
Patch:Lastly, she is known as the Energizer Bunny of Nobel Laureates. This is because of her tireless efforts in pursuing truth and her relentless optimism about the future of democracy.
Carmina:And Patch, she had a homecoming of sorts in Tom's River, right?
Patch:Yes, that's right. Well, last year she visited her old alma mater, Tom's River High School. They celebrated her and all her accomplishments, and they named the new auditorium after her.
Carmina:Aww, Can we go?
Patch:<laugh>? I know. You know, in her speech she did advice that every decision they make will shape who they are.
Carmina:Back to the present moment of the past. I hope they take it to heart because it really is so true.
Patch:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>,
Carmina:She describes her life as a rollercoaster. One day she wins the Nobel Prize, and then a few weeks later she gets arrested. But she says she just embraces it and she considers herself lucky because compared to fellow journalists who are in hiding, in exile, in jail, or worse dead, she is still out there working and exposing lies. And I was shocked to learn this Patch. Twenty-three journalists were murdered during the Duarte administration and two, since Marcos took office last year. Last year, a radio journalist, Renato Blanco, was stabbed and a broadcast journalist, Percival Mabasa was shot dead.
Patch:So Carmina, good news, right? Most recently she was acquitted.
Carmina:Yeah, that's right. Patch. On January 18th, 2023, Maria was acquitted on her tax evasion charges. And this is from the 80 page court decision. Maria and Rappler did not commit the supposed violations and civil liability cannot be awarded since there is no act or omission punishable by law.
Patch:She's currently on bail and is appealing a six year prison sentence from a cyber liable conviction. So really, very much so her freedom is at stake. And one of her interviews, she mentioned that she didn't realize how much her life changed until she couldn't do a lot of the things that she used to do, like travel freely.
Carmina:So in a lot of her TV interviews after she was acquitted, did you notice something?
Patch:Um, not really.
Carmina:She was wearing a pink suit.<laugh>.
Patch:Oh right.<laugh>.
Carmina:So apart from being a symbolic color for women, it is also a well-known color associated with another woman we admire. And I wonder if our listeners can guess who.
Patch:And that's our episode. We hope you join us on our next trip.
Carmina:O siya, siya!
Patch:Ingat! Thanks for listening to FilTrip with Carmina and Patch. Support FilTrip through Patreon or PayPal, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever all podcasts are downloaded.
Carmina:Thanks to FilTrip sponsor, Solepack, a functional shoe accessory bag. Visit thesolepack.com for more details.
Patch:Email us at thefiltrip@gmail.com.