How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In this impassioned warning and inspirational call to arms, Ressa identifies and illuminates her core values of empathy, honesty, and faith in humanity to illustrate how a strong commitment to such foundational beliefs can provide the key to democracy's survival. . . . Searing and electrifying." -- Booklist (starred review)

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize comes an impassioned and inspiring memoir that chronicles her career fighting fascism, filled with insights and advice for standing against authoritarian bullies and confronting disinformation and lies. It includes a foreword by Amal Clooney.

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.

But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country's most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.

There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep toward authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation--a heinous web of cause and effect--that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain's Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

Maria A. Ressa, CNN's lead investigative reporter in Asia, has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for more than sixteen years. In 1988, she was named CNN's Manila bureau chief and, in 1995, became CNN's Jakarta bureau chief. In addition, Ressa has traveled extensively and reported from India, Kashmir, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the United States. Videotapes of her coverage of terrorism were found in what experts believe to be Osama bin Laden's private videotape collection in Afghanistan.

Ressa graduated from Princeton University. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines in 1986, where she attended graduate school at the University of the Philippines. Among the awards she has received are the Asian Television Award in 1999 for Indonesia, the SAIS-Novartis International Journalism Award in 2000 for her work in East Timor, the Ferris Professorship of Journalism in 2001, and the National Headliner Award for Investigative Journalism in 2002.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780063257511
ISBN 10	0063257513
Title	How to Stand Up to a Dictator
Author	Maria Ressa
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2022-11-29
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.