The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila.
A Novaya Gazeta cover story says ‘the troika is back’, referring to military tribunals in Stalin-era courts run by the secret police. Photograph: Novaya Gazeta
Nearly a century on, Ressa is one of two journalists who will step onto the Nobel stage in Oslo next Friday. She is currently facing jail for “cyberlibel” in the Philippines while the other recipient Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, is standing guard over one of the last independent newspapers in an increasingly dictatorial Russia.
For Ressa, whose news site, Rappler, has had its licence suspended and who wasn’t even sure she would be able to go and pick up the award until Friday when the government granted her permission, the parallels between the modern moment and the 1930s are all too terrifyingly obvious.
“It’s a huge signal that we are in that same kind of moment. We are on the verge of fascism. It’s different this time because it’s being enabled by technology but it’s also happening faster. There is this insidious manipulation happening at scale and humanity is wrapping its head around that.”
It is, she says, “a sliding doors moment”.
For Muratov, too – speaking in a rare interview over Zoom on a flying visit to New York last month – there is no doubt that the award is symbolic not just of an existential threat to press freedom but of a world on the brink. “I think our world has stopped loving democracy and has started reaching for dictatorships. Journalists are like independent media. They’re the defence line between dictatorship and war.”…
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