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Time Person of Year 2018
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THE CHOICE
BY
EDWARD FELSENTHAL
It has long been the first move in the authoritarian playbook: controlling the flow of information and debate that is freedom’s lifeblood. And in 2018, the playbook worked. Today, democracy around the world faces its biggest crisis in decades, its foundations undermined by invective from on high and toxins from below, by new technologies that power ancient impulses, by a poisonous cocktail of strongmen and weakening institutions. From Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley, manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread in so many of this year’s major headlines, an insidious and growing threat to freedom.
As Facebook faced an overdue reckoning on how to control the driverless car of social media, hazards to traditional sources of information continued to mount. On Nov. 28, owners of more than 400 media outlets in Hungary “donated” control to a pro-government conglomerate created by allies of its nativist Prime Minister. This spring, two journalists in India, the world’s largest democracy, were killed in separate, deliberate hit-and-run attacks in the span of 24 hours. In June, a subject of a local newspaper’s coverage was accused of having marched into its Maryland newsroom and killing five staffers. This fall, CNN has twice had to evacuate its New York offices because of bomb threats.
In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage. Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.
They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.
***
For all the insults hurled by the President at the press, rhetoric which has been deployed by dangerous actors around the world, the U.S. remains a beacon for truth and free expression. This is a nation where, as we saw this year, a news organization can sue the White House and win, even at the hands of a judge appointed by that very White House.
One of the people who sought refuge in these freedoms was Khashoggi, the most visible representative of this harrowing year for truth. This marks the first year TIME has named someone who is no longer alive a Person of the Year. But it is also rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death. Directed by a killer whose motive was “control of information,” as Khashoggi’s fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted, the murder has prompted a global reassessment of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, who a CIA assessment concluded likely ordered the killing, and the devastating war he has waged in Yemen.
Ressa is the founder and editor of a Philippine news site, Rappler, known for its fearless reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s propaganda machine and extrajudicial killings. In return, she has faced a barrage of government lawsuits aimed at the site, and violent hate messages on social media—at one point, 90 of them an hour. “Now is certainly not the time to be afraid,” she said on Dec. 3 after turning herself in and posting bail on tax-fraud charges that would carry jail sentences of up to 10 years—charges widely viewed as an effort to stifle her work.
The repercussions aren’t always from above. The gunman at the Capital Gazette allegedly was a local man aggrieved, years after the fact, that the paper’s reporting had brought his harassment of a woman out of the shadows. The massacre he perpetrated made America the fourth deadliest country in the world to be a journalist this year. But while the loss was immense and intensely personal, that day the staff at one of the nation’s oldest news outlets did what it has done since before the American Revolution—they put the paper out.
The press always has and always will commit errors of judgment, of omission, of accuracy. And yet what it does is fundamental. Says Andrea Chamblee, whose husband John McNamara was one of the five Capital Gazette staffers killed: “A lot of people don’t understand how important what goes on in their community is to them and how it affects their quality of life until it’s gone.”
For taking great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts that are central to civil discourse, for speaking up and for speaking out, the Guardians—Jamal Khashoggi, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, Maria Ressa and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.—are TIME’s Person of the Year.
BY
EDWARD FELSENTHAL
TIME’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ON WHY THE GUARDIANS ARE THE PERSON OF THE YEAR
On the outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, two young reporters sit in a prison said to be “the darkest hellhole in Burma.” Millennials, we would call them in America—Wa Lone is 32 years old; Kyaw Soe Oo is 28. The genesis of their arrest, one year ago on Dec. 12, is their reporting for the Reuters news service that later exposed a mass execution of 10 Rohingya Muslims, part of a violent campaign against the minority group by Myanmar’s military. “I never expected he would be arrested,” says Kyaw Soe Oo’s wife Chit Su Win. “I was more concerned about him getting shot.”It has long been the first move in the authoritarian playbook: controlling the flow of information and debate that is freedom’s lifeblood. And in 2018, the playbook worked. Today, democracy around the world faces its biggest crisis in decades, its foundations undermined by invective from on high and toxins from below, by new technologies that power ancient impulses, by a poisonous cocktail of strongmen and weakening institutions. From Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley, manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread in so many of this year’s major headlines, an insidious and growing threat to freedom.
As Facebook faced an overdue reckoning on how to control the driverless car of social media, hazards to traditional sources of information continued to mount. On Nov. 28, owners of more than 400 media outlets in Hungary “donated” control to a pro-government conglomerate created by allies of its nativist Prime Minister. This spring, two journalists in India, the world’s largest democracy, were killed in separate, deliberate hit-and-run attacks in the span of 24 hours. In June, a subject of a local newspaper’s coverage was accused of having marched into its Maryland newsroom and killing five staffers. This fall, CNN has twice had to evacuate its New York offices because of bomb threats.
In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage. Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.
They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.
***
For all the insults hurled by the President at the press, rhetoric which has been deployed by dangerous actors around the world, the U.S. remains a beacon for truth and free expression. This is a nation where, as we saw this year, a news organization can sue the White House and win, even at the hands of a judge appointed by that very White House.
One of the people who sought refuge in these freedoms was Khashoggi, the most visible representative of this harrowing year for truth. This marks the first year TIME has named someone who is no longer alive a Person of the Year. But it is also rare that a person’s influence grows so immensely in death. Directed by a killer whose motive was “control of information,” as Khashoggi’s fellow Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted, the murder has prompted a global reassessment of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, who a CIA assessment concluded likely ordered the killing, and the devastating war he has waged in Yemen.
Ressa is the founder and editor of a Philippine news site, Rappler, known for its fearless reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s propaganda machine and extrajudicial killings. In return, she has faced a barrage of government lawsuits aimed at the site, and violent hate messages on social media—at one point, 90 of them an hour. “Now is certainly not the time to be afraid,” she said on Dec. 3 after turning herself in and posting bail on tax-fraud charges that would carry jail sentences of up to 10 years—charges widely viewed as an effort to stifle her work.
The repercussions aren’t always from above. The gunman at the Capital Gazette allegedly was a local man aggrieved, years after the fact, that the paper’s reporting had brought his harassment of a woman out of the shadows. The massacre he perpetrated made America the fourth deadliest country in the world to be a journalist this year. But while the loss was immense and intensely personal, that day the staff at one of the nation’s oldest news outlets did what it has done since before the American Revolution—they put the paper out.
The press always has and always will commit errors of judgment, of omission, of accuracy. And yet what it does is fundamental. Says Andrea Chamblee, whose husband John McNamara was one of the five Capital Gazette staffers killed: “A lot of people don’t understand how important what goes on in their community is to them and how it affects their quality of life until it’s gone.”
For taking great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts that are central to civil discourse, for speaking up and for speaking out, the Guardians—Jamal Khashoggi, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, Maria Ressa and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.—are TIME’s Person of the Year.
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The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government. He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out. And he was murdered for it.
Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, “I can’t breathe,” recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.
But the crime would not have remained atop the world news for two months if not for the epic themes that Khashoggi himself was ever alert to, and spent his life placing before the public. His death laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-U.S. alliance and—in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links—the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?
Khashoggi put his faith in bearing witness. He put it in the field reporting he had done since youth, in the newspaper editorship he was forced out of and in the columns he wrote from lonely exile. “Must we choose,” he asked in the Washington Post in May, “between movie theaters and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?” Khashoggi had fled his homeland last year even though he actually supported much of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s agenda in Saudi Arabia. What irked the kingdom and marked the journalist for death was Khashoggi’s insistence on coming to that conclusion on his own, tempering it with troubling facts and trusting the public to think for itself.
Such independence is no small thing. It marks the distinction between tyranny and democracy. And in a world where budding authoritarians have advanced by blurring the difference, there was a clarity in the spectacle of a tyrant’s fury visited upon a man armed only with a pen. Because the strongmen of the world only look strong. All despots live in fear of their people. To see genuine strength, look to the spaces where individuals dare to describe what’s going on in front of them.
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. 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, allegationsthat could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years.
In Annapolis, Md., staff of the Capital, a newspaper published by Capital Gazette Communications, which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution, press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28. Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines, never more than this year.
And in prison in Myanmar, two young Reuters reporters remain separated from their wives and children, serving a sentence for defying the ethnic divisions that rend that country. For documenting the deaths of 10 minority Rohingya Muslims, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone got seven years. The killers they exposed were sentenced to 10.
This year brought no shortage of other examples. Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam was jailed for more than 100 days for making “false” and “provocative” statements after criticizing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in an interview about mass protests in Dhaka. In Sudan, freelance journalist Amal Habani was arrested while covering economic protests, detained for 34 days and beaten with electric rods. In Brazil, reporter Patricia Campos Mello was targeted with threats after reporting that supporters of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro had funded a campaign to spread false news stories on WhatsApp. And Victor Mallet, Asia news editor for the Financial Times, was forced out of Hong Kong after inviting an activist to speak at a press club event against the wishes of the Chinese government. Worldwide, a record number of journalists—262 in total—were imprisoned in 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expects the total to be high again this year.
This ought to be a time when democracy leaps forward, an informed citizenry being essential to self-government. Instead, it’s in retreat. Three decades after the Cold War defeat of a blunt and crude autocracy, a more clever brand takes nourishment from the murk that surrounds us. The old-school despot embraced censorship. The modern despot, finding that more difficult, foments mistrust of credible fact, thrives on the confusion loosed by social media and fashions the illusion of legitimacy from supplicants.
Modern misinformation, says David Patrikarakos, author of the book War in 140 Characters, titled after the original maximum length of a Twitter post, “does not function like traditional propaganda. It tries to muddy the waters. It tries to sow as much confusion and as much misinformation as possible, so that when people see the truth, they find it harder to recognize.”
The story of this assault on truth is, somewhat paradoxically, one of the hardest to tell. “We all learned in our schools that journalists shouldn’t be the story ourselves, but this is, again, not our choice,” says Can Dündar, who, after being charged with revealing state secrets and nearly assassinated as a newspaper editor in Turkey, fled to Germany, where he set up a news site. “This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth.”
That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone. “I think the biggest problem that we face right now is that the beacon of democracy, the one that stood up for both human rights and press freedom—the United States—now is very confused,” says Ressa, the Rappler editor. “What are the values of the United States?”
Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, “I can’t breathe,” recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.
But the crime would not have remained atop the world news for two months if not for the epic themes that Khashoggi himself was ever alert to, and spent his life placing before the public. His death laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-U.S. alliance and—in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links—the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?
Khashoggi put his faith in bearing witness. He put it in the field reporting he had done since youth, in the newspaper editorship he was forced out of and in the columns he wrote from lonely exile. “Must we choose,” he asked in the Washington Post in May, “between movie theaters and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?” Khashoggi had fled his homeland last year even though he actually supported much of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s agenda in Saudi Arabia. What irked the kingdom and marked the journalist for death was Khashoggi’s insistence on coming to that conclusion on his own, tempering it with troubling facts and trusting the public to think for itself.
Such independence is no small thing. It marks the distinction between tyranny and democracy. And in a world where budding authoritarians have advanced by blurring the difference, there was a clarity in the spectacle of a tyrant’s fury visited upon a man armed only with a pen. Because the strongmen of the world only look strong. All despots live in fear of their people. To see genuine strength, look to the spaces where individuals dare to describe what’s going on in front of them.
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. 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, allegationsthat could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years.
In Annapolis, Md., staff of the Capital, a newspaper published by Capital Gazette Communications, which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution, press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28. Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines, never more than this year.
And in prison in Myanmar, two young Reuters reporters remain separated from their wives and children, serving a sentence for defying the ethnic divisions that rend that country. For documenting the deaths of 10 minority Rohingya Muslims, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone got seven years. The killers they exposed were sentenced to 10.
This year brought no shortage of other examples. Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam was jailed for more than 100 days for making “false” and “provocative” statements after criticizing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in an interview about mass protests in Dhaka. In Sudan, freelance journalist Amal Habani was arrested while covering economic protests, detained for 34 days and beaten with electric rods. In Brazil, reporter Patricia Campos Mello was targeted with threats after reporting that supporters of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro had funded a campaign to spread false news stories on WhatsApp. And Victor Mallet, Asia news editor for the Financial Times, was forced out of Hong Kong after inviting an activist to speak at a press club event against the wishes of the Chinese government. Worldwide, a record number of journalists—262 in total—were imprisoned in 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expects the total to be high again this year.
This ought to be a time when democracy leaps forward, an informed citizenry being essential to self-government. Instead, it’s in retreat. Three decades after the Cold War defeat of a blunt and crude autocracy, a more clever brand takes nourishment from the murk that surrounds us. The old-school despot embraced censorship. The modern despot, finding that more difficult, foments mistrust of credible fact, thrives on the confusion loosed by social media and fashions the illusion of legitimacy from supplicants.
Modern misinformation, says David Patrikarakos, author of the book War in 140 Characters, titled after the original maximum length of a Twitter post, “does not function like traditional propaganda. It tries to muddy the waters. It tries to sow as much confusion and as much misinformation as possible, so that when people see the truth, they find it harder to recognize.”
The story of this assault on truth is, somewhat paradoxically, one of the hardest to tell. “We all learned in our schools that journalists shouldn’t be the story ourselves, but this is, again, not our choice,” says Can Dündar, who, after being charged with revealing state secrets and nearly assassinated as a newspaper editor in Turkey, fled to Germany, where he set up a news site. “This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth.”
That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone. “I think the biggest problem that we face right now is that the beacon of democracy, the one that stood up for both human rights and press freedom—the United States—now is very confused,” says Ressa, the Rappler editor. “What are the values of the United States?”
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The question no longer seems strange, for the same reason a close look at where we get our news no longer sounds like civics-class homework. In normal times, the U.S. news media is so much a part of public life that, like air, it’s almost impossible to make it out. But it has been made conspicuous—by the attacks and routine falsehoods of the President, by social-media behemoths that distribute news but do not produce it and by the emerging reality of what’s at stake.
Efforts to undermine factual truth, and those who honestly seek it out, call into doubt the functioning of democracy. Freedom of speech, after all, was purposefully placed first in the Bill of Rights.
In 2018, journalists took note of what people said, and of what people did. When those two things differed, they took note of that too. The year brought no great change in what they do or how they do it. What changed was how much it matters.
***
“I can tell you this,” declared Chase Cook, a reporter for the Capital Gazette. “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”
Cook’s promise, shared with the world on Twitter, came just a few hours after five of his colleagues were killed. The man charged with their murders had been obsessed with the paper since it wrote about his harassment of a high school classmate—part of its routine coverage of local legal proceedings. He made the office a crime scene. To put the damn paper out, staffers set up laptops in the bed of a pickup in a parking garage across the street.
Khashoggi was a leading journalist in Saudi Arabia for decades before fleeing to the U.S. in 2017. In columns for the Washington Post, he criticized Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s quest for total power and suppression of free speech. On Oct. 2, Khashoggi was murdered by agents of the kingdom inside its Istanbul consulate, while his fiancée waited for him outside.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME (Source photo: Alamy)
When the next edition arrived—on schedule—the opinion page was blank but for the names of the dead. Gerald Fischman. Rob Hiaasen. John McNamara. Rebecca Smith. Wendi Winters. Beneath their names was a coda that might have been written with a goose quill: “Tomorrow this page will return to its steady purpose of offering our readers informed opinion about the world around them, that they might be better citizens.”
That’s the workaday business of local news. “Community journalists are the only ones who are going to go to your kid’s basketball game,” says Selene San Felice, a Capital Gazette features reporter. “They’re the only ones who are going to cover lifeguard training ... They’re the only ones who are going to cover your local elections and tell you exactly what’s going on.”
This passing of valued information is a wholesome essential of self-government. We can’t reason together if we don’t know what we’re talking about. But the information has to be trusted.
It mostly still is, in places like Annapolis, where the Capital Gazette operates. A poll released in August by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit devoted to improving journalism, found that more than 70% of Americans express either “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in both their local papers and local TV news, even as resources for both continue to shrink. It’s what you might expect of neighbors. At the local level, journalists and community remain mutually reinforcing.
The national media enjoyed the same kind of connection not so long ago. In 1976, 72% of Americans voiced trust in all news outlets (before 1972, whether Americans trusted the news media was not a question Gallup bothered to ask). But while most institutions rode a steady downslope in public confidence in the jaundiced aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the national media traveled its own path. There was a split—by party.
Efforts to undermine factual truth, and those who honestly seek it out, call into doubt the functioning of democracy. Freedom of speech, after all, was purposefully placed first in the Bill of Rights.
In 2018, journalists took note of what people said, and of what people did. When those two things differed, they took note of that too. The year brought no great change in what they do or how they do it. What changed was how much it matters.
***
“I can tell you this,” declared Chase Cook, a reporter for the Capital Gazette. “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”
Cook’s promise, shared with the world on Twitter, came just a few hours after five of his colleagues were killed. The man charged with their murders had been obsessed with the paper since it wrote about his harassment of a high school classmate—part of its routine coverage of local legal proceedings. He made the office a crime scene. To put the damn paper out, staffers set up laptops in the bed of a pickup in a parking garage across the street.
Khashoggi was a leading journalist in Saudi Arabia for decades before fleeing to the U.S. in 2017. In columns for the Washington Post, he criticized Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s quest for total power and suppression of free speech. On Oct. 2, Khashoggi was murdered by agents of the kingdom inside its Istanbul consulate, while his fiancée waited for him outside.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME (Source photo: Alamy)
When the next edition arrived—on schedule—the opinion page was blank but for the names of the dead. Gerald Fischman. Rob Hiaasen. John McNamara. Rebecca Smith. Wendi Winters. Beneath their names was a coda that might have been written with a goose quill: “Tomorrow this page will return to its steady purpose of offering our readers informed opinion about the world around them, that they might be better citizens.”
That’s the workaday business of local news. “Community journalists are the only ones who are going to go to your kid’s basketball game,” says Selene San Felice, a Capital Gazette features reporter. “They’re the only ones who are going to cover lifeguard training ... They’re the only ones who are going to cover your local elections and tell you exactly what’s going on.”
This passing of valued information is a wholesome essential of self-government. We can’t reason together if we don’t know what we’re talking about. But the information has to be trusted.
It mostly still is, in places like Annapolis, where the Capital Gazette operates. A poll released in August by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit devoted to improving journalism, found that more than 70% of Americans express either “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in both their local papers and local TV news, even as resources for both continue to shrink. It’s what you might expect of neighbors. At the local level, journalists and community remain mutually reinforcing.
The national media enjoyed the same kind of connection not so long ago. In 1976, 72% of Americans voiced trust in all news outlets (before 1972, whether Americans trusted the news media was not a question Gallup bothered to ask). But while most institutions rode a steady downslope in public confidence in the jaundiced aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the national media traveled its own path. There was a split—by party.
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'I’ve been a war-zone correspondent. That is easy compared to what we’re dealing with now.'
Maria Ressa
Ressa co-founded the news site Rappler. It has relentlessly covered the brutal drug war of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, including extrajudicial killings that have alarmed human-rights advocates. Duterte has called Rappler “fake news” and banned its reporters from presidential events. The government recently charged Ressa with tax fraud—a move widely viewed as an attempted crackdown on Rappler's reporting. She faces a possible 10-year sentence.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
Maria Ressa
Ressa co-founded the news site Rappler. It has relentlessly covered the brutal drug war of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, including extrajudicial killings that have alarmed human-rights advocates. Duterte has called Rappler “fake news” and banned its reporters from presidential events. The government recently charged Ressa with tax fraud—a move widely viewed as an attempted crackdown on Rappler's reporting. She faces a possible 10-year sentence.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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A Bangladeshi police officer grabs the mouth of photographer Shahidul Alam, preventing him from speaking to the press during a court appearance in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Aug. 6. Alam was arrested after criticizing the government in an interview.Suvra Kanti Das
Alam, a photographer and activist who has documented human-rights abuses and political upheaval in Bangladesh for over 30 years, was arrested in August for making “false” and “provocative” statements after criticizing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in an interview. He could still face up to 14 years in prison if convicted, but he plans to cover the country's election on Dec. 30 amid concerns of election rigging.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, known by her pen name Mother Mushroom, is a Vietnamese blogger who drew attention for criticizing the Communist Party–controlled government. In 2017, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “propaganda against the state.” In October, Quynh was released in a freedom-for-exile deal. Now in the U.S., she vows to continue highlighting abuses in her home country.
Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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Dulcina Parra covers crime as a radio reporter in Los Mochis, a city in Mexico’s Sinaloa state that has been ravaged by drug violence. This year she worked to publicize the efforts of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, a group of mothers devoted to searching for those believed to have been abducted or killed by cartels—a number estimated at more than 37,000. In 2009 she herself was kidnapped after investigating threats to doctors at a local hospital amid gang clashes. Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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Reuters journalists Wa Lone, center front, and Kyaw Soe Oo, center back, after their trial began in Yangon, Myanmar, on Jan. 10. The pair had documented the regime’s ethnic cleansing; their prosecution has been widely viewed as retribution. They were sentenced in September to seven years in prison.Lynn Bo Bo—EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
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'Some of my Facebook friends attacked me and would ask, 'Why can't you control your husband?'
They called him and Kyaw Soe Oo traitors. I have just become numb to it.'
Pan Ei Mon
Chit Su Win and Pan Ei Mon, photographed here with their children, are the wives of two Reuters journalists who have been jailed in Myanmar since December 2017. The arrest of the two men, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone, was widely viewed as retribution for their work exposing the regime’s atrocities against the Rohingya minority.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
They called him and Kyaw Soe Oo traitors. I have just become numb to it.'
Pan Ei Mon
Chit Su Win and Pan Ei Mon, photographed here with their children, are the wives of two Reuters journalists who have been jailed in Myanmar since December 2017. The arrest of the two men, Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone, was widely viewed as retribution for their work exposing the regime’s atrocities against the Rohingya minority.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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Put it another way, all are deserving. Unsung heroes
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'This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth.
When you start defending the truth, you become the story itself.'
Can Dündar
Dundar, former editor-in-chief of the Turkish opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, lives in exile in Berlin. He fled Turkey in 2016 after he was detained for months and convicted of revealing state secrets over a story he published alleging that Turkey delivered weapons to Islamist militants in Syria. He survived an assassination attempt during the trial and managed to leave the country while appealing the case.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
When you start defending the truth, you become the story itself.'
Can Dündar
Dundar, former editor-in-chief of the Turkish opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, lives in exile in Berlin. He fled Turkey in 2016 after he was detained for months and convicted of revealing state secrets over a story he published alleging that Turkey delivered weapons to Islamist militants in Syria. He survived an assassination attempt during the trial and managed to leave the country while appealing the case.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2008
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'Freedom of expression is like a jungle now. We have no laws.
You’re not a citizen. You are nothing.'
Amal Habani
Habani covers government corruption, police abuses and human-rights violations as a freelance journalist in Sudan. Authorities there have detained her 15 times and banned her writing from a major newspaper. In January, she was held for 34 days and assaulted with electric rods for reporting on economic protests.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
You’re not a citizen. You are nothing.'
Amal Habani
Habani covers government corruption, police abuses and human-rights violations as a freelance journalist in Sudan. Authorities there have detained her 15 times and banned her writing from a major newspaper. In January, she was held for 34 days and assaulted with electric rods for reporting on economic protests.Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME
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