In February 1986, Scot Marciel was driving home after midnight and went past what he assumed was just another protest near military facilities in downtown Manila. The gathering, less than a year into his first overseas assignment with the Foreign Service, turned out to be the early days of the Philippine People Power revolution, leading to the end of the Ferdinand Marcos regime. This was just one of several times during his 35-year career in the State Department that Marciel would find himself witnessing historic moments in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. relationship with the countries of the region.

That illustrious career includes being the first U.S. diplomat to work in Hanoi since the end of the Vietnam War and serving as the first U.S. ambassador for ASEAN Affairs and as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and Myanmar.

Marciel, Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at FSI and affiliated with APARC, has distilled his experiences and observations into his new book, Imperfect Partners: The United States and Southeast Asia (Shorenstein APARC/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). In it, he offers his on-the-ground account of the ups and downs of critical U.S. relationships in the region — focusing on the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia — and examines the role of ASEAN and China’s influence in Southeast Asia.

To mark the book’s release, we talked with Marciel about recent events in the region and his views on how the United States should approach Southeast Asian countries in the context of China’s efforts to sow closer ties with them. Watch the conversation:

A Return to the Philippines

The Philippines under President Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos, Jr. is now allowing U.S. forces expanded access to four of its bases. Marciel, who first met Marcos, Jr. as the provincial governor of Ilocos Norte in 1985, expressed some surprise at the Philippine president’s rapid shift to strengthen the country’s alliance with the United States. He noted, however, that even in the last year of the Duterte presidency, which frequently was at odds with the United States, there was some recognition in the Philippines that the relationship with China wasn’t bearing the fruit that had been anticipated. Marciel also pointed out that the deal with the United States does not mean Marcos has abandoned China: he is still working on keeping the relationship with Beijing healthy and visiting Japan, another important partner.

Although there is some Philippine civil opposition to the renewed presence of U.S. forces, Marciel believes that the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) will provide an opportunity for a “more modern and equal partnership,” and hopefully one that can supplant memories of the U.S. colonial history in the Philippines.

Southeast Asian Charm Competition?

As concern continues to rise about a possible invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China, some have questioned the effectiveness of the U.S. capability to compete with China, particularly in terms of a diplomatic offensive. Marciel responded to a recent New York Times article on U.S. and Chinese efforts to “woo” Indonesia. As China continues to seal trade deals in Southeast Asia, some of which are part of its Belt and Road Initiative, we asked whether the United States can compete with China’s free-flowing cash.

Marciel, taking a step back, cautions that “Indonesia is not a prize to be won,” and that we should not be “scoring diplomatic relations like a sporting event” when we look at improving ties with the countries of Southeast Asia. Indonesia, for example, has a long history with the Non-Aligned Movement, so while it attempts to attract foreign investment, it will resist aligning with any one major power. China tends to offer attractive investment packages with minimal conditions, but “you can’t always count on those investments to happen,” notes Marciel, and even when they do, there can be issues with corruption, as well as social and environmental consequences. The United States tries to put together investments that consider issues like labor and the environment, but Marciel believes that “sometimes we aim a little high” and the conditions make U.S. offerings less attractive.

The Continuing Crisis in Myanmar

We spoke with Marciel just after the second anniversary of the 2021 coup in Myanmar. He began his term as U.S. ambassador to that country in 2016, just before Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s new government was about to take office. As he puts it, it was a time of “euphoria,” not only in Myanmar but also in terms of U.S. hopes for democracy there. It turned out to be a difficult four years for Myanmar and Marciel, as the Rohingya crisis repeatedly erupted and the Myanmar military reacted with violent operations that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya out of Myanmar. As Marciel relates in his book, he soon found that even using the word “Rohingya” in U.S. embassy statements could create a diplomatic crisis.

Even with the horrific Rohingya genocide, Marciel cautiously notes that by 2020, when he left the country, most people in Myanmar had more opportunity and freedom under four years of a democratically elected government—the Rohingya themselves being the obvious exception. But in 2021, the “military coup basically eliminated that hope and opportunity.”

Marciel doesn’t hold much hope for an end to the coup anytime soon, but he does see at least one “positive development” over the last two years. During the worst of the Rohingya crisis, many in the majority Bamar community did not believe the reports of massacres, or even worse, did not care. But now, after two years of military rule, “more and more Myanmar people are explicitly recognizing the legitimate grievances and the suffering of many of the ethnic minority populations, including the Rohingya, over the past years, and [there is] some recognition that they were fed a lot of propaganda for a long time about what was really happening.”

Establishing Relations with Vietnam

One of Marciel’s great success stories is the normalization of U.S. ties with Vietnam. It was an improbable success with any number of obstacles likely to prevent it from happening, not the least being the debate about the fate of U.S. prisoners of war and servicemen reported as missing in action. Saigon fell in 1975, and yet in 1995, just 20 years later, diplomatic relations were restored and the U.S. embassy opened in Hanoi.

According to Marciel, it took patience, pragmatism, but also the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. No longer able to rely on Soviet help for their economy, the Vietnamese became more open to work with the United States, particularly on POW-MIA issues, allowing Vietnamese imprisoned in re-education camps to flee the country, and withdrawing Vietnamese forces from Cambodia.

Marciel sees the U.S.-Vietnam relationship today as a “good-news story” that shows the degree of progress that can be attained when two countries are willing to be rational and work together. The United States still has significant concerns about human rights in Vietnam yet “both sides have agreed to talk about that issue, but not let it define or limit the relationship excessively.”

How the United States Can Improve Relations in Southeast Asia

When pressed for a prescription on what the United States can do to further improve its relationships with the countries in the region, Marciel said, “In brief, show up and engage consistently, with humility, and with a focus on the countries that we’re talking to, not on China, because what they’re looking for, for the most part is, ‘Can we count on the United States being a long-term partner?’”

By ensuring the reliability of the partnership, countries in Southeast Asia have more freedom of maneuver, and they can, if necessary, be more capable to “make decisions China might not like.” The flip side of that—the failure to show up at presidential and high governmental levels, like what happened during the Trump administration—means “you’ve undone all the good that you had done in previous years by investing in those relationships.” The price of isolationism, of neglecting U.S. diplomatic relations in Southeast Asia, is that those countries lose confidence in the United States as a reliable partner. 

There’s a great deal of support for community policing, but not a lot of concrete data on whether it works. What makes this a challenging issue to study?

Christia: Building trust between police and the citizens they are tasked to protect is at the core of community policing. As such, an important challenge lies with identifying the right measures to capture this often-complex police-citizen interaction. This was even more of a pronounced challenge in our study as we conducted six coordinated experiments across a diverse set of sites in the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda.

To make progress in understanding the impacts of community policing, we needed to develop a set of common strategies for the police to implement that made sense in each national context, which we call locally appropriate community policing interventions. We also needed to agree upon a shared research design across countries and to introduce common outcome measures to ensure that we were looking at the impacts of these programs in similar ways. This approach to launching coordinated, multi-site, randomized controlled trials across contexts has been pioneered by the organization that sponsored this work, Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).

Your team partnered with six communities across the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda. Based on your research, what evidence did you find for or against the use of community policing practices?

Blair: We find that community policing doesn’t live up to its promise when implemented in the Global South. Community policing doesn’t build trust between citizens and police, it doesn’t lead to citizens to share the kinds of tips and information with police that might improve police efficiency, and, perhaps not surprisingly then, it does not lead to lower crime. This disappointing result was apparent across all six contexts and for all of the primary outcomes we measured.

Is there an alternative to community policing, or ways to reform these systems, that would make them more efficacious at creating the desired outcomes?

Weinstein: We carefully examined each of the six contexts, including through interviews with the police agencies and the research teams, to make sense of this null result. We identified three primary constraints that may have impeded the implementation of community policing: (a) a lack of prioritization of these new practices by police leadership (b) the rotation to new posts of police officers who had championed the effort and were trained to implement it and (c) limited resources to follow up on the concerns raised by citizens.

The bottom line is that community policing isn’t positioned to deliver increased trust and collaboration in environments with limited incentives and resources to enable police to change their behavior. Our conclusion is that community policing should be seen as an incremental reform that can make a difference in well-resourced police departments with strong incentives to be responsive to citizen concerns. But when those conditions are absent, an incremental approach can’t deliver. More systemic reforms are required.

How does the data from your work fit into broader issues of equity, just representation, and racism that communities across the world continue to grapple with?

Blair: In many ways community policing appears to be the ideal policy for this moment, where so many are demanding that police abuse be reduced while also reducing crime victimization. Community policing is meant to do both, constructing a virtuous cycle between citizen-police cooperation, trust, and crime reduction. Our null results sound a note of caution: it may not be so simple. We observed big barriers to implementing this shift in policing, and barriers that likely affect other incremental policies. To address equity in the way governments enforce the law, we may need more systematic changes to how we organize the police and hold them accountable.   

In 2005, Chito was a member of the first class of CDDRL's Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program, which trains global leaders working on the front lines of democratic change. Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, noted that he was "a pioneer with us and with all that he did."

In addition to his time as a Draper Hills Summer Fellow, Chito Gascón was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2007. Former NED president and frequent Draper Hills contributor Carl Gershman shared that “Chito was a brilliant and dedicated democracy activist, a gentle personality with a tough inner core and immense courage. He will be sorely missed by countless friends, myself included, and by people around the world who are fighting for democracy and human dignity.”

Image

This is the third installment in our series, “Stories in a Time of Pandemic,” in which APARC alumni across Asia share their perspectives on the responses to and implications of COVID-19 in their communities. In part 1 and part 2 of the series, we feature observations from our alumni in China, Mongolia, Myanmar, and Singapore.

---

The first case of COVID-19 in the Philippines was reported on January 30, 2020, and local transmission was confirmed on March 7, 2020. As of May 21, the number of cases of COVID-19 has risen to 13,434 and the number of deaths attributed to the virus increased to 846, according to the Philippine Department of Health COVID-19 Case Tracker. It is quite alarming that among the ASEAN countries, the Philippines had the second-highest mortality due to COVID-19, next to Indonesia (as per May 5 date by the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard). This could be attributed to several factors, including whether the country’s health system can handle the overwhelming demand for health care due to the COVID-19 crisis and how effective the government’s response is in stemming the spread of this new pathogen. Inherent in the death statistics is the capacity of a country to conduct COVID-19 tests, which means that there should be a sufficient number of test kits available and that the health workers are properly trained to conduct the tests, trace the contacts, and isolate identified individuals.

The President of the Philippines imposed a total lockdown called enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) for the entire island of Luzon, which encompasses eight administrative regions, including the national capital region, from March 15 to April 30. Other parts of the country have also been under some degree of quarantine at different periods since the appearance of local transmission. Executive Order 112, signed on April 30, 2020, was issued to further extend the ECQ in identified high-risk areas and a general community quarantine (GCQ) in the rest of the country. The inter-agency task force for the management of emerging infectious diseases defines ECQ as the implementation of temporary restrictions on the mobility of people, strict regulations of industries, and a heightened presence of uniformed personnel. GCQ is, in a nutshell, a less strict version of ECQ.

Image

Image captured from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Southeast Asia COVID-19 Tracker, May 21, 2020.

The Philippines has faced a lot of challenges during this crisis. First, the health system lacks adequate surge capacity to safely handle a nationwide outbreak of COVID-19 due to shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), mechanical ventilators, and hospitals with ICUs and isolation beds (see this World Bank report and this Rappler article). More importantly, the insufficient number of health workers, especially in areas outside the metropolitan, is a major concern. Nonetheless, the Department of Health has worked hard to meet the surge in demand due to COVID-19, including partnering with the private sector to repurpose structures and providing data to the public to ensure transparency and accountability. As in other countries, the health workers and those with frontline responsibilities have truly been the new heroes or “bayani” with their tireless efforts and sacrifices. 

Another challenge pertains to the adverse economic impact of COVID-19. The Philippines has a relatively large informal sector and the income of many families depends on daily transactions with no formal job or social security. This has prompted the government to extend cash or in-kind support to vulnerable populations – a response that has posed several challenges, particularly related to the who/what/how framework. First, the Philippine government had to properly identify those in need (who). Second, it had to ensure that sufficient resources can be allocated to the identified groups (what). And third, it had to distribute aid in an efficient, timely, and equitable way (how). The government's social welfare efforts to provide for the vulnerable groups have mixed results: at times, the distribution of aid is organized and efficient, at other times insufficient and disorderly (see these CNN Philippines reports of April 7 and April 30).

COVID-19 in the Philippines – How Filipinos Have Coped

There has been a strong spirit of “bayanihan” or collectivism in the country amidst the COVID-19 crisis. People are volunteering, distributing goods to vulnerable groups, or donating PPE to those with frontline duties. Some enterprises also rose to the occasion by repurposing their businesses to meet the local demand for medical products and PPE.

Different individuals have coped differently: some have welcomed the work hiatus that the quarantine has afforded them, some connected more with friends and family, others become more productive working from home. Staying healthy and being mindful are also factors that contribute to remaining calm and rational in this time of national distress.

Despite the challenges, we will continue to face, especially once the quarantine has eased and the new normal is in effect, we can say that Filipinos have also learned some valuable lessons amid this crisis. For one, Filipinos have become more mindful of the importance of good sanitation and non-pharmaceutical public health measures in mitigating the transmission of the virus. Most Filipinos have also become more proactive in their approach, keeping social distance, wearing masks, and practicing proper handwashing, among others. Furthermore, this crisis has redefined and created new heroes who rose to the challenge – from those staying at home to avoid the further spread of the virus to those on the frontline who have dedicated their time and effort to combat the pandemic, to government and business leaders who have served the country sincerely during this crisis.

Perhaps there really is a silver lining in every cloud.

An expanded version of this article was published on June 8, 2020 in the Harvard Misinformation Review.

The perception of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been a significant challenge for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the past two months. The CCP has been attempting to control the narrative and deflect blame since the start of the outbreak, both domestically and abroad. It has done this by drawing on its substantial state- and CCP-owned media apparatus.  

Chinese state media produces and disseminates daily English-language content to English-speaking audiences via Facebook and Twitter (platforms that are technically banned in China). Chinese state media’s English-language Facebook pages post very frequently, and have extremely large audiences. CGTN has over 96 million Page likes; CNN in contrast has only 32 million. These media properties run ads regularly to grow their audiences, which suggests that China invests in these pages as a tool for communicating its message to the English-speaking world. Facebook’s Ads Library shows specific regional ad targeting in India (Punjab State), Nepal, Bangladesh (Dhaka) and the Philippines (Manila), suggesting that English is used to communicate state views to a broad global audience.

To look at how coronavirus narratives targeting English-speaking audiences have played out on Chinese state media, and how they evolved as the outbreak has moved through various phases, we analyzed a data set of Facebook posts containing the keyword “coronavirus” from two distinct sets of media properties: 1) a collection of English-language Chinese (state) media outlets, and 2) a collection of U.S. media outlets*. This “coronavirus” dataset contained 6,870 posts from Chinese media between December 31, 2019 and March 16, 2020, and 13,522 posts from U.S. media outlets over the same period. While Chinese media has increased its coronavirus coverage in January and stayed at a consistent level since then, U.S. media Facebook posts on the coronavirus stayed at low levels until late February, then soared (see histograms below).

 
Chinese outlets (left) increase the number of Facebook posts on coronavirus in late January. U.S. media coverage was light until a sudden increase of posts since late February.

China’s media spin: rapid recovery 

Chinese and U.S. media articles display different levels of both alarmism and optimism in their coverage of the global pandemic. Chinese outlets included many articles with a focus on positive stories such as the number of recovered patients and examples of successful treatments, while U.S. media reported on new cases of infections and trends in death. For example, Chinese state media reported on a coronavirus patient who gave birth to a healthy baby not infected with coronavirus, whereas the U.S. media told the story of a different newborn in Wuhan who had become the youngest coronavirus patient. CNN credited the story’s source as Chinese state media CCTV, yet no English-language Chinese state media posted this story on their Facebook pages. 

Chinese state outlet China Daily (left) reports on a baby born to a coronavirus patient with no infection, whereas CNN (right) reports on a newborn baby becoming the youngest person diagnosed with coronavirus

We searched our dataset for the word “patient” and analyzed words commonly used before or after “patient” in Facebook posts made by Chinese state media and U.S. mainstream media. From December 31, 2019 to March 16, 2020, the term “infected” was commonly used in connection with “patient” in both the American and Chinese media (see word clouds below). However, beyond that common term, there are significant divergences, such as the U.S. media reporting on patients as “sick” or “affected”, and the Chinese media frequently mentioning treatment- and recovery-related terms such as “treating”, “recovered”, “discharged” and “cured”.

Words frequently used in connection with the word “patient” by Chinese media (left) and U.S. media (right); Exclude “patient” and the term “coronavirus” for better visibility of other terms. Chinese media use several recovery- and treatment-related terms.

The English-language Chinese state media has also aggressively reported positive stories about the make-shift hospitals built for China’s immediate emergency response to the coronavirus outbreak. Leishenshan and Huoshenshan hospitals were built in just a few days in late January to early February. Chinese state media disseminated stories about how the international community was “impressed” with China’s rapid building capacity, calling the quick progress of the construction a “miracle.” U.S. media also reported on the rapid building of the hospitals but presented them in a less positive light, saying they were a response to overwhelmed medical facilities or that the temporary structures should not be characterized as hospitals. 

 
Chinese state outlet CGTN (left) calls the hospital a “construction miracle”, whereas NPR (right) reports on the building, but qualifies it that the term “hospital” for the building ”may not be exactly on point”

The Li Wenliang Case

A significant story that played out as the coronavirus outbreak unfolded was that of late whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang, who was one of the first to report the existence of the novel disease warning fellow medics in a chat group on December 30, 2019. His warnings were shared publicly and reached a wide audience online. On January 3, 2020 police detained and forced him to sign a letter stating he had made “false comments.” In a late January post on Chinese social media Weibo, Li reported from his hospital bed that he was in an intensive care unit with breathing difficulty. Li Wenliang died of COVID-19 on February 7, 2020 at age 34. The significant public anger that erupted over his death created a very dangerous moment for the Chinese regime, and required Chinese media to delicately balance covering his story without casting the Chinese government in a bad light.

In our dataset, there are 24 posts by Chinese media and 24 posts by U.S. media containing “Li Wenliang”. The word clouds below represent the 50 most common words used in these articles after filtering out common words such as “the” and excluding the terms “coronavirus”, “li”, and “wenliang”. While in U.S. media, prominent terms associated with Li Wenliang include “silenced”, and “authorities”, these terms are notably absent in Chinese media. Chinese media instead focus on him being an “ophthalmologist” and expressing “condolences”.

Image

Individual popular Facebook posts illustrate this contrast: The Facebook post with the highest engagement (49,093 Reactions, 2,242 times shared) posted by Chinese state media in English state they “deeply mourn” his death and that he passed away after “all-effort rescue.” There is no mention of the whistleblower controversy and the restrictions placed on him early in the outbreak.

Chinese state media outlet People’s Daily (left) post on Li Wenliang “mourning” his death, without mentioning his whistleblowing and repression faced by authorities; Most popular post in U.S. media on Li Wenliang (right) mentions he was “threatened” by Chinese officials

In contrast, the most popular social media posting on Li Wenliang in the U.S. media (27,263 Reactions, 43,190 times shared) mentions that he was “threatened” and that he had “sounded the alarm” on coronavirus. Other articles and posts in U.S. media link Li Wenliang’s case to censorship and suppression in China, mentioning how Chinese netizens have demanded freedom of speech since the details of Wenliang’s story were brought to light.

A popular NPR post links Li Wenliang’s name to censorship in China

‘Buying the world time’ vs. ‘Botching the response’

Early in the global outbreak, Chinese outlets declared a local victory over the virus, stating that China’s efforts had prevented coronavirus from infecting the world, boasting: “Were it not for the unique institutional advantages of the Chinese system, the world might be battling a devastating pandemic.”  As global coronavirus infections near two hundred thousand, and cases of infection and deaths outside China surpass those within, this narrative has become less defensible.

 China has responded by increasing its efforts to position itself as a world leader in virus response and a model of effective governance whilst blaming the United States for the coronavirus pandemic. While U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien has stated that China’s silencing of whistleblowers and covering up early cases in fact exacerbated the global outbreak, Chinese state media has disseminated a statement by Bruce Aylward, Assistant Director-General of the WHO who visited China on a WHO-mission, saying that China’s response “bought the world time” and that the global community should be “grateful.”

Chinese state media (here: Xinhua) widely shared a statement by Bruce Aylward of the Chinese WHO office saying that China’s response had bought the world time 

The narrative of China’s strategy ‘buying the world time’ has been covered and discussed in U.S. media as well, after World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also stated that China's response had bought the world time. MSNBC included the phrase in a Facebook post from March 13, 2020, which went on to discuss whether U.S. leadership had in fact missed the opportunity to take advantage of that time. The New York Times also referenced the phrase in the headline of a nuanced article on the same day, which similarly wondered why the rest of the world had simply watched the epidemic unfold. 

U.S. media outlet MSNBC discussing the comparative response of China and the U.S., including the narrative that “China has bought the world time”

Looking Forward

Chinese state media is not unique in evolving its narratives, or in spreading misinformation or omitting facts to cast itself in the best light possible for a global audience. In the U.S. media environment, the Fox News network has also dramatically shifted their coverage of the coronavirus disease in response to political considerations, adjusting their coverage to make the U.S. executive branch leadership look like leaders. This tone change was so brazen that the Washington Post labeled it “a petri dish for misinformation.” While we did not include far left or far right U.S. media sources in our data set for the above analysis, other US news outlets also downplayed the threat.

In the latest activity from the U.S. media, there is now a dichotomy in coverage: many conservative outlets are accusing the Chinese government of causing a global pandemic due to the significant missteps in their early response, and deflecting blame from the Trump Administration's own failures. The other side is reporting on the problematic response in the United States, while highlighting later successful Chinese containment efforts.

The blame game will not be helpful. It is both true that the Chinese government made strikingly bad decisions in its early response to the virus - and also that the United States will suffer from its own lack of preparation. Meanwhile, amid the bungled U.S. COVID-19 response - including a lack of coordination even with close allies - the Chinese government is supporting hard-hit countries by sending supplies and medical experts, garnering praise from around the world. As Western democracies struggle to land on effective COVID-19 responses, experts expect a more aggressive narrative to come from Beijing.

* Chinese media: CGTN; People’s Daily, China; China Xinhua News; China Daily; Global Times; CGTN America
U.S. media: ABC News; ABC World News Tonight with David Muir; AP; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; CNN Politics; Fox News; Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, NBC News, NPR; NPR Politics; POLITICO; Reuters; The Atlantic; The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; TIME; Washington Post

“Our dystopian present is your dystopian future if nothing significant is done,” cautioned Ressa, urging the Stanford community to pressure technology platforms and social media to stop disinformation spread.

“This is an existential moment for global power structures, turned upside down by technology. When journalists globally are under attack, democracy is under attack.” With these words, the internationally-esteemed investigative journalist and press freedom champion Maria Ressa, winner of the 2019 Shorenstein Journalism Award, opened her keynote address at a lunchtime ceremony, held at Stanford on October 21.

Ressa knows first-hand the terrifying reality of continuously being subject to online attacks and politically motivated attempts by the government to silence and intimidate. As CEO and executive editor of Rappler, she has led the Philippine independent news platform in shining critical light on the Duterte administration's policies and actions. President Duterte in turn has made no secret of his dislike for Ressa and Rappler, accusing the platform for carrying "fake news." Ressa has been arrested twice this year, accused of corporate tax evasion and of violating security laws, and slapped with charges of cyber libel for a report that was published before the libel law came into effect. Since Duterte’s election in summer 2016, the Philippine government has filed at least 11 cases and investigations against Ressa and Rappler.

“And all because I’m a journalist,” she says.

Speaking at the Shorenstein Award’s eighteenth annual panel discussion, Ressa detailed the devastating effects that disinformation has had on democracy and societal cohesion in the Philippines. She vividly explained why each and every one of us should be gravely concerned about the breaking down of the information ecosystem in a country halfway around the world. The Philippines, she said, is a case study of how attacks on truth and facts rip the heart out of civic engagement and gradually kill democracy, “a death by a thousand cuts.”

Ressa was joined on the panel by Stanford’s Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Raju Narisetti, director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism and professor of professional practice at Columbia Journalism School, who also serves on the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award. Shorenstein APARC’s Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson chaired the discussion.

[To get more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox sign up to receive our newsletters.] 

A Cautionary Tale

Modern authoritarians follow a familiar playbook, noted Ressa, for they know well that “If you can make people believe lies are the facts, then you can control them.” Their first step is to lie all the time. The second is to argue their opponents and the journalists are the ones who lie. Then finally everyone looks around and says, "What's truth?" And when there is no truth resistance is impossible.

Ressa went on to describe detailed examples of patriotic trolling in the Philippines, that is, how state-sponsored online hate and harassment campaigns silence and intimidate journalists and others who voice criticism of the Duterte administration. Instead of censoring, she said, state agents now flood the information ecosystem with lies, blurring the line between fact and fiction. These information operations are conducted through the weaponization of technology and social media platforms, first and foremost Facebook. Ressa’s team at Rappler uses network analysis methods to unveil the flow and spread of online disinformation and harassment campaigns on Facebook and from there to other platforms as well as traditional and state media.

Ressa urged the packed audience of campus and community members to remember that “Without facts you cannot have truth, without truth you cannot have trust, and without any of these three democracy as we know it is dead. The public sphere is dead […] our Philippine dystopian present is your dystopian future, if nothing significant is done.”

She closed her keynote by pleading: “Please push tech platforms and social media to do something to stop the lies from spreading. Lies laced with anger and hate spread faster than facts. Fight  for your rights.”

Watch Ressa’s keynote and the entire panel proceedings here or on our YouTube channel. You can also listen to Ressa’s keynote below and on our SoundCloud channel. A transcript of the keynote address is available below.

No Ministry of Truth

Is the attack on truth a technological problem, and can it have a technological solution? It's naïve, said Diamond, to think that there is a purely technological solution or that we can rein in the alarming developments in the Philippines and elsewhere without addressing their technological elements and the economic incentives underlying these elements. “There has to be a macro political element of response,” argued Diamond, “which obviously has to involve advanced liberal democracies condemning and drawing boundaries around the murderous authoritarianism of Rodrigo Duterte.”

Image

Left to right: Donald K. Emmerson, Maria Ressa, Raju Narisetti, Larry Diamond.

Narisetti emphasized the need to look at the problem and its potential solutions holistically and bear in mind that solutions must come from multiple areas. “We must remember that technology has value, but it has no values. It's a matter of who is using it and how they're using it.” And while we certainly don't want Facebook to be the Ministry of Truth, continued Narisetti, by no means do we want Congress to take on that role. He pointed to specific possible regulatory solutions, such as insisting Facebook enable its users to port their complete data outside of the platform if they wish to do so, or establishing a system of data and privacy courts.

Commitment to Journalism that Courageously Seeks Accuracy

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which is sponsored by APARC, was presented to Ressa at a private evening ceremony. “You would be hard pressed to find a person whose work more fully embodies the ideals that define journalism than Maria Ressa,” said James Hamilton, Stanford’s Hearst Professor of Communication, Chair of the Department of Communication, Director of the Stanford Journalism Program, who also serves on the selection committee for the award. Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin joined Hamilton in co-presenting Ressa the award.

The Shorenstein Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes accomplished journalists committed to critical reporting on and exploring the complexities of Asia through their writing. It alternates between honoring recipients from the West, who mainly address American audiences, and recipients from Asia, who often work on the frontline of the battle for freedom of the press in their countries. Established in 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, who was passionate about promoting both excellence in journalism and a deeper understanding of Asia.