Reporting on extrajudicial killings — murders carried out by state actors or by non-state vigilantes with the cover of state sanction — poses specific challenges to investigative journalists. Here are tips from two extraordinary reporters working in the Philippines: Rappler’s Patricia Evangelista and Reuters’ Clare Baldwin.
Once one of Asia’s freest media, the Philippines’ independent news outlets are under sustained attack by President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies, ranging from legal and political assaults to harassment by armies of online trolls. Pro-Duterte columnists are now attacking the modest funding that the country’s media nonprofits receive from overseas, claiming, without evidence, that they are part of a foreign plot to oust Duterte. In this powerful rebuttal, Sheila Coronel, a co-founder of the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism, takes on the lies and misinformation behind the campaign.
Maria Ressa is a former CNN war correspondent, but none of her experiences in the field prepared her for the destructive campaign of gendered online harassment that’s been directed at her since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.
