Sharing with our community this speech delivered by Maria Ressa after she received the 2021 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize…
“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: the coronavirus, climate, the atom bomb that exploded in our information ecosystem when journalists lost gatekeeping powers to technology companies. Tech abdicated responsibility for the public sphere and couldn’t seem to fathom that information is a public good. Women, people of color, the LGBTQ, those already marginalized become even more vulnerable as you’ll see in the UNESCO report “The Chilling” whose lead author, ICFJ’s Julie Posetti, convinced me to speak up when my attacks began many years ago.”
“Those with power and money must choose. Ask yourselves these questions: Who are you? What do you stand for? What kind of world do you want in the next decade? The more you have, the more you must risk. Because silence is complicity.”