If you believe Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa, social media is detrimental to freedom of expression and the press because it condones fake news. But the question is, is fake news any different from biased reporting? Or is it one and the same?
Ressa has been able to reap much from her false depiction of the situation in the Philippines since Duterte became President. She described the country as a “combat zone” and inflated drug war deaths from less than 5,000 to over “20,000.” Rappler has become the opposition’s propaganda machine, spewing out article after article which is critical of the administration and in praise of the opposition.
In the past, one can run a grant search on the National Endowment for Democracy website to find out how much monies have been given to Philippine NGOs. The latest search for updated grants have turned out nothing. This must have been the result of the intense focus on Ressa after her Nobel Prize win. Several objective news outlets reported extensively about her ties to Pierre Omidyar and the Open Society Foundation of George Soros.
It’s good that digital records are now easily stored and we have our last downloads on file. The images below show what would normally turn up in a search on the NED website.
As you can see from the above, the NED has been very active in the Philippines shortly after the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the Presidency. The NGOs on the list are mostly involved in the promotioni of human rights and identified with the opposition.
The petition filed at change.org for her Nobel Peace Prize to be withdrawn was also taken down because Pierre Omidyar is also the principal shareholder change.org. Is this the kind of freedom that Ressa and her cohorts are preaching? The kind where their ilk is in power?
Ressa has been very vocal of her criticism leveled at social media. While she has a point, Rappler, together with Vera Files, have both been appointed fact-checkers in the country by the Poynter media organization. You’re correct if you’ve guessed that Poynter is also a part of the Omidyar Network.
Rappler and Vera Files have been actively tagging anti-opposition and pro-administration posts on Facebook, where the primary battle is being fought since it is the go-to social media platform of most Filipinos.
It is ironic that while Ressa is supposedly for freedom and democracy, she is suppressing the freedom of expression of the individual, a basic human right and an act which social media platforms have given individuals throughout the world.
Ressa has the gall to make it appear that she’s being persecuted by the administration even if the cases filed against her and Rappler have basis in fact. Rappler’s coporate structure of a holding and an operating company allows monies to be funneled to the holding company in order to keep the operating company afloat even if it has been sustaining losses.
The social news network has been on a hiring binge of late, adding Inday Espina Varona and John Nery to its team. The two are senior practicing “journalists.” It looks like they have been brought in to watch over the millennials which composes the greater majority of Rappler’s reporters. It is also branching out heavily into livestreaming on social media. Varona and Espina are backing up Executive Editor Glenda Gloria, whom Ressa promoted last year, as she focuses more on her pet causes as a sort-of Ambassadress at-large for “persecuted” journalists.
You wonder why her foreign counterparts believe what Ressa says about the Philippines. This is partly attributable to the fact that liberals and lefist-militants tend to have siloed mindsets. The enemy of one, is the enemy of all. Anyone who is not with them, is against them. It also hews closely to the standard good versus evil narrative as employed by the opposition against Duterte and Marcos.
We have been witness to this in the 2020 US election, where US media displayed its bias for Biden to ensure his victory against Trump. Rappler and its media cohorts are doing the same for the 2022 election cycle in favor of the opposition. It offers only biased analyses which is black propaganda. It gives favorable coverage to allies and doesn’t give the public the benefit of coming to their own opinion based on facts, as what real journalism should be.
Ressa and Rappler aren’t even trying to maintain the pretense of being objective. They are out and out biased and they don’t care about what the general public thinks for so long as they have their cult-like following from among the opposition ranks.
Ressa is a walking billboard for her own and her principal’s causes. The Nobel Prize was given to her to reinforce her credbility as a spokesperson for journalists being “silenced” throughout the world.
She is also a walking contradiction against the vilification campaign she has undertaken against the Philippines, if all she has said is true, why is she still out on bail and why is Rappler still operating?
The supreme irony is lost on Maria Ressa as she enjoys her fifteen minutes of fame.
Kommentare