Nobel-winning journalist Maria Ressa is recognized at Capitol

Members of Hawaii’s state Senate honored journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa at the state Capitol on Monday for her unyielding stance to protect freedom of expression.

Greeted with lei, Sens. Bennette Misalucha, Clarence Nishihara and Donna Mercado Kim presented Ressa with a certificate honoring her efforts to protect journalistic integrity, and to congratulate the Nobel Prize laureate — the first from the Philippines to be awarded the prize.

Members of the Filipino Association of University Women and the University of the Philippines Alumni Association of Hawaii also joined lawmakers to congratulate the award-winning journalist.

“She’s such a larger-than-life figure,” said Mi­salucha (D, Pearl Harbor-Pearl City-Aiea).

“We just admire her for her courage,” she added. “She’s protecting journalistic integrity, freedom of expression. … It is a basic tenet of who we are as a nation.”

Ressa is in Hawaii to participate in the 2022 East-West Center International Media Conference at the Hawai‘i Convention Center, where she is scheduled to deliver the opening keynote speech today. The conference theme this year is “Connecting in a Zero-Trust World.”

Ressa is co-founder and chief executive officer of Rappler, a digital media company in the Philippines.

The news site has reported on the thousands of killings in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.

Ressa has also reported on how social media is being used to disseminate false information.

In December, Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for using the “freedom of expression to expose abuse of power, use of violence and growing authoritarianism in her native country,” as described on the Nobel Prize website.

“I haven’t done anything differently from when I became a journalist in 1986. It takes a lot more courage to just stand by your values. Please remember the goodness of humanity. That’s the part that technology is slowly taking away. It is doing an ‘us against them.’ … Avoid this,” Ressa said to the dozens of attendees at the ceremony.

Born in Manila, Ressa and her family migrated to Toms River, N.J., in 1973. She attended Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Eng­lish and certificates in theater and dance.

In 1986 she returned as a Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines, where she began her career as a journalist working at various news organizations that included ABS-CBN and CNN.

Before she co-founded Rappler, she did investigative reporting on terrorism in Southeast Asia.

At CNN, Ressa opened the network’s Manila bureau as well as the Jakarta bureau in Indonesia.

In 2018 she was named a Time Magazine Person of the Year.