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| - Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, convicted Monday in a controversial libel case, has become a symbol of the fight for press freedom in an era of strongmen leaders. Media advocates say the critical reporting from her news site Rappler has unleashed a grinding series of criminal charges, two arrests and a deluge of online threats against her. Monday saw likely the most serious trouble to date, a conviction on a cyber libel case that could send her to prison if her appeals of the judgement are rejected. Yet through this Ressa, 56, has remained based in the Philippines and continued to speak out against the government of Rodrigo Duterte despite the risks. "I'm not a sole reporter," Ressa told AFP in an interview last week. "My job is to hold up the ceiling, it has been for a while... so that our folks can continue working." Ressa's position at the head of the site meant getting, by her own estimate, up to 90 abusive messages per hour online at one point toward the end of 2016. The threats came in the months after Duterte took power and launched his narcotics crackdown that has killed thousands. Rappler was among the domestic and foreign outlets that published shocking images of the killing and questioned its legal basis. But Ressa's arrests wouldn't come until early 2019. The first was in February and was over the libel case, then a second one less than two months later on allegations Rappler violated laws barring foreign ownership of media. Due to the string of libel and tax cases against her and Rappler, Ressa says she had to post bail eight times in the span of about three months. She had already been named a Time Person of the Year in 2018 for her work, but the arrests further grew her international profile and drew more attention to her case. It was an entirely new set of threats for Ressa, who was a veteran of conflict zones before co-founding Rappler. "I began as a reporter in 1986 and I have worked in so many countries around the world, I have been shot at and threatened but never this kind of death by a thousand cuts," Ressa said Monday after the verdict. As CNN's former bureau chief in Manila and Jakarta, Ressa specialised in terrorism where she tracked the links between global networks like Al-Qaeda and militants in Southeast Asia. The Princeton graduate, who holds both American and Filipino citizenship, later returned to the Philippines to serve as news chief at the nation's top broadcaster ABS-CBN. In 2012 Rappler was launched, which brought together multimedia reporting and social media to offer an edgy take on Philippine current events. However that website has had to fight for survival as Duterte's government has accused it of violating a constitutional ban on foreign ownership in securing funding, as well as libel and tax evasion. Duterte has attacked Rappler by name, calling it a "fake news outlet", over a story about one of his closest aides. Though the government has said that it has nothing to do with any of the cases against her, press freedom advocates disagree. "This sentence (in the libel case) bears the malevolent mark of President Duterte and his desire, by targeting Rappler and the figure of Maria Ressa, to eliminate all criticism whatever the cost," said Reporters Without Borders (RSF). bur/jm/rbu
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