Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Filipino journalist and Rappler Chief Executive Maria Ressa speaks out regularly about the decline of democracy. (Reuters: Eloisa Lopez/File)
There was international outrage this week at the killing of at least 22 people, including health workers, emergency response crews and five journalists, on an outside staircase at a hospital in Gaza.
There is so much death in Gaza, through both violence and starvation. The world sometimes seems to have got used to such things.
But on this occasion, we could see it happen with our own eyes.
A second strike — which appears to have come from two separate projectiles — occurred as people on the stairwell were responding to an initial strike which had killed a Reuters cameraman, and several other people.
The stairwell was a regular spot for journalists to file their stories from: one of the few places in Gaza where there was usually a mobile signal.
Hussam Al-Masri working on the same balcony where he was killed by Israeli fire. (Source: Mohammed Al-Hadad/Instagram )
Estimated 247 journalists killed in Gaza
The outrage about what it is known as a "double tap" attack didn't just involve the actual killings.
There was incredulity over the response from the Netanyahu government and the IDF: first flat denials that it was a deliberate strike, then a suggestion the deaths had been a "tragic mishap", then that the strikes had involved targeting six Hamas terrorists or a Hamas camera operator.
It had echoes of the way the story of the killing of workers from World Central Kitchen, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, unfolded last year.
It was an example of what Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa says is a trend in which leaders around the world, including US President Donald Trump, feel they can act with impunity.
"This is our generation. This is our time. Will our leaders come together [to address this]? Because what we've seen is impunity, the violation of the international rules-based order," she told me.
"In fact, impunity reigns now, right? You have Putin, Netanyahu, you have all of the violence in in Africa. You have Myanmar in my part of the world, and many more. You have the threat that China will follow, and their tactics are the same tactics used by the tech CEOs."
Intentionally attacking civilians like aid and rescue workers, and journalists, is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.
Of course, we would have been oblivious to these events, and been unable to form our own views about them, if it was not for the fact that they were recorded and transmitted by journalists on the ground in Gaza in the first place.
Israel has not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza for the past two years, so it has been left to Palestinian journalists to tell the story of what is going on there, at increasingly hazardous personal cost.
Earlier this month prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed, along with three of his colleagues, in an Israeli strike on a media tent.
Estimates vary but the United Nations says there have been 247 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Flak jackets and cameras were placed on the bodies of journalists Mohammed Salama, who Qatar-based Al Jazeera said worked for the broadcaster, and Hussam al-Masri, who was a contractor for Reuters. (Reuters: Stringer)
Israel 'never held to account'
Ressa observes that Israel is "never held to account" over the killings.
"So what are we all going to do? Are we just going to watch? That's a challenge to governments, right? I know it's complex. We all know it's complex, but it's also about power and money. So you gotta get your act together. Will we? Where's our humanity? Will we allow humanity to win, or will it lose? And if it does, that's on our conscience," she says.
"Freedom of speech is largely an illusion if you cannot help people who are dying."
Ressa, who is in Australia at present, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fearless reporting of the regime of former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, particularly the wave of extra-judicial killings he unleashed as part of an "anti-drugs" campaign which saw almost 30,000 Filipinos lose their lives.
Duterte is now facing charges in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
But beyond speaking out for the assault on journalists around the world, Ressa speaks out regularly about the decline of democracy.
"Seventy-two per cent of the world is now under authoritarian rule," she says. "We're literally electing illiberal leaders democratically."
Ressa ponders out loud about the decline of democracy in the United States under Trump, and the impact of American democracy falling "off the edge of the cliff", having watched it happen in the Philippines under Duterte.
"When I watched what was happening in the US, I felt both deja vu and PTSD," she says.
"It's death by 1,000 cuts, right?"
Fact, truth, trust
She says the trend demands pushing back against all the smaller changes, like Associated Press standing by its decision not to change the naming conventions of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America shortly after Trump came to office.
"It's these small things. You cannot voluntarily give up your rights, because when you do, you will have a harder time getting them back," she says.
Ressa's ongoing international focus — and of Rappler, her online website in the Philippines — is on the role of social media in spreading fake news, harassing opponents and manipulating public discourse.
She is as exercised about the big tech companies as she is about the rise of the "strongmen" leaders who she says have been elected with the aid of social media.
Ressa welcomes Australia's social media ban for children under 16, not because it means they are not exposed to violence and pornography but because she believes social media is undermining democracy.
"The design of these social media platforms that are meant to connect us … have actually hacked our biology for profit," she says.
"They figured out that the goal is to keep us scrolling because they make more money as we scroll. And by design, it spreads lies faster than facts, and if you incite fear, anger and hate, it spreads even faster."
This doesn't just affect individual users of social platforms but "can now reach to the cellular level of a democracy, change the way we feel, which changes the way we look at the world, which changes the way we act and the way we vote".
"What I'm worried about is that, by design, we're killing democracy, and it takes so much more energy and effort to reclaim our rights because we've been insidiously manipulated," she says.
Politicians around the world have "got to learn the tech better, but you don't have to learn it to regulate it," she says, arguing social media is perhaps one of the least regulated markets in the world.
"It's easier to get the support when you talk about kids. But it's not just the kids who are being manipulated. This is the platform used to attack [journalists] so that we cannot do our jobs."
Ressa's mantra is fact, truth, trust.
"Without facts, you can't have truth," she says. "Without truth, you can't have trust.
"Without these three, you have no shared reality. We can't begin to have a conversation. We can't begin to solve any problems — and we have existential ones, like climate change. We can't have journalism. We can't have democracy."
Maria Ressa's ongoing international focus is on the role of social media in spreading fake news, harassing opponents and manipulating public discourse. (Foreign Correspondent: Tom Hancock)
Fighting back with data
Ressa says it is possible for people, and institutions, to fight back.
While Duterte's regime not only used social media to threaten Ressa and Rappler, it bullied advertisers to abandon the platform to challenge its financial viability.
They fought back, she says, with data.
"At the beginning, these stories don't get traction but as the Duterte drug war got worse and worse, you know, the estimates of up to 30,000 people killed; 27,000 by December, 2018, people kept going back to those stories," she says.
"So this is part of our task. Now, as journalists, as we're under attack, we still chronicle history. We're still the first page, and we tell people. They may not listen right now, but they come back, and I know that our ability to move from hell [under Duterte] to purgatory [under current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr] would have been really different if Rappler had stopped."
She notes, too, the election outcomes in Australia and Canada after voters had watched what was happening in Trump's America.
Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is facing charges in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. (Reuters: Lisa Marie David)
Australia's role in the region
In the case of the Philippines, she thinks there may have been a quicker reaction to the abuses of the Duterte regime "because we lived through 1986, the People Power revolt".
"The beginning of my career as a reporter was covering the end of strong man rule in Southeast Asia, and as they turned into democracies," Ressa says.
Now "at the tail end" of her career, she says she is watching the pendulum swing back in other direction.
But now it is not just about Southeast Asia.
"So this is a challenge for Americans," she says. "It's also a challenge for Australians, because you're in in our part of the world, you can lead. Australia seems to have, like, a 'will we or will we not' [approach]."
Ressa thinks Australia has a bigger role to play in the region, and in shoring up democracy, a role she thinks it has stepped back from in recent years.
"Australia was always such a big player in Indonesia," she says.
The former Jakarta CNN bureau chief says she remembers Australia's big role in East Timor, and "the kind of solidarity in ASEAN, a Pacific nation" with former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pushing for a bigger ASEAN that included Australia.
Her hope is that the current world will produce new international alliances, possibly even led by the global south, to hold up some sense of an international order.
But for now we live in a world where international geopolitics is being at least partially distorted by a US president who is demanding he, like Ressa, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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