Asian journalists among Time’s 2018 Person of the Year'

Time magazine made four covers for its Person of the Year issue. Two of them featured the wives of imprisoned
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and Maria Ressa. right.

TIME MAGAZINE named three Asian journalists along with slain Saudie columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the staff of the Capitol Gazette, victims of a mass shooting, as its 2018 Person of the Year Tuesday (Dec. 11).

"The Guardians," says Time emphasizes the important role of journalists and press freedom in today's world where reporters and editors are threatened, killed and jailed for doing their job -- reporting the news. 

They are journalists from different parts of the world who are "taking great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts, for speaking up and for speaking out," writes Time.

The three Asian journalists were Rappler CEO Maria Ressa, who was threatened with jail for criticizing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly war on drugs in her online news site; and Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have been jailed in Myanmar for a year.

"As we looked at the choices it became clear that the manipulation and abuse of truth is really the common thread in so many of this year's major stories, from Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley," said Edward Felsenthal, Time's editor-in-chief.

"So we chose to highlight four individuals and one group who have taken great risks in pursuit of greater truth ..."

"In the Philippines, a 55-year-old woman named Maria Ressa steers Rappler, an online news site she helped found, through a superstorm of the two most formidable forces in the information universe: social media and a populist President with authoritarian inclinations," Time wrote in its cover article. 

"Rappler has chronicled the violent drug war and extrajudicial killings of President Rodrigo Duterte that have left some 12,000 people dead, according to a January estimate from Human Rights Watch. The Duterte government refuses to accredit a Rappler journalist to cover it, and in November charged the site with tax fraud, allegations that could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years."

On the day Time honored her, Ressa paid her bail to avoid jail on charges of tax fraud, which Ressa says is a harassment tactic of the administration.

"Rappler's fearless journalism has helped to expose the deadly reality of the so-called 'war on drugs' – and the thousands of unlawful killings of poor and marginalized people perpetrated in its name," Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International's East and Southeast Asia regional director, said in a statement.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are a pair of young Reuters journalists who were placed behind bars by the government of Myanmar because of their reporting on the killings of Rohingya Muslims human rights advocates call "ethnic cleansing."

“For documenting the deaths of 10 minority Rohingya Muslims, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone got seven years,” TIME reported. “The killers they exposed were sentenced to 10.”

The magazine went on to say: "As the government and military offered full-throated denials of wrongdoing against the Rohingya, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were uncovering information about the bloodshed Myanmar has tried to shield from the world. The Reuters investigation, which was published in February, documented with photographic evidence the slaughter and mass burial of 10 Rohingya men. In return, they were accused of providing information that could be useful “to enemies of the state.”

Khashoggi was killed by Saudi henchmen because of Washington Post articles about the Saudi Arabia regime.

The Gazette was targeted by a gunman who went to their office in Annapolis, Maryland and killed fiveof the newspaper's employees.

The Washington Post applauded Time for its message of support for journalists.

"We hope this recognition will prompt our nation's leaders to stand up for America's values and hold accountable those who attempt to silence journalists who cover our communities or in Jamal's case, an oppressive authoritarian government," said Fred Ryan, the Post's publisher and CEO.
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Reuters news agency win two Pulitzers for its work in Philippines, Myanmar

REUTERS, the London-based news agency, won an unprecedented two Pulitzer prizes for its work in Southeast Asia.

A Filipino journalist was among those who won this year’s prestigious Pulitzer Prize for “relentless reporting” on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs war.

Manuel “Manny” Mogato, colleagues Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall from international news agency Reuters were cited for their “relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.”

“It was a team effort. Every one in the Manila bureau did their job but it was months of hardwork and I admired the courage, strength, and perseverance of the team to pursue the drugs war story,” said Mogato, who has been Reuters' political and general news correspondent in Manila for 15 years.

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Manuel Mogato, Reuters' Manila correspondent, won part of a team honored by winning this year's Pulitzer.

Winning a Pulitzer Prize, a recognition for outstanding work, is journalism's highest honor.

“In a year in which many Pulitzers were rightly devoted to U.S. domestic matters, we’re proud at Reuters to shine a light on global issues of profound concern and importance,” Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said in an address to the Reuters' newsroom in London.

In the Philippines coverage, the Reuters team “demonstrated how police in the president’s ‘drug war’ have killed with impunity and consistently been shielded from prosecution,” Adler said.

The coverage included a report that revealed how a police anti-drug squad on the outskirts of Manila had recorded an unusually high number of killings. Many members of the squad came from a distant place that was also Duterte’s hometown, where the campaign’s brutal methods originated during his time as mayor there. 

They identified not just new patterns in the killings, but also the top killers, corroborating their findings with months of risky reporting in slums and hostile police stations. The series explored how Philippine police use hospitals to cover up drug-war executions; how a group of police officers from Duterte’s hometown Davao formed the core of a lethal anti-drug unit; and how Duterte targets Philippine children in a bid to widen the drug war. 

The Pulitzer committee recognized the team for their “relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.”

Mogato, a veteran Filipino journalist who previously worked for the Manila Chronicle before joining Reuters, is the second Philippines-based journalist to win the prestigious journalism award, after Carlos P. Romulo became the first non-American to be given the Pulitzer Prize in Correspondence in 1942.

REUTERS

View the photo gallery of the Myanmar exodus. 

Reuters photographers Adnan Abidi, Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Hannah McKay, Cathal McNaughton, Damir Sagolj, Danish Siddiqui and Soe Zeya Tun were recognized in the category of Feature Photography for their coverage of the mass exodus of the Rohingya people to Bangladesh.

The Rohingyas’ migration from Myanmar is grueling and deadly. Hundreds of thousands of people, wet, caked in mud, exhausted, starving or sick, arrive in a state of panic and need the last of their energy. To document it was a severe challenge to Reuters journalists.  To see a gallery of their photos, click here.

The Pulitzer judges honored the team “for shocking photographs that exposed the world to the violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar.”

As Reuters garners international praise for its reporting, the news agency has hired human rights attorney Amal Clooney, wife of the actor, to represent them in gaining the release of two its reporters who have been under arrest by Myanmar authorities since Dec. 12, 2017.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some rolled up papers at a restaurant in northern Yangon by two policemen they had not met before, having been invited to meet the officers for dinner.

A request to dismiss the case for lack of evidence was denied last week.

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