In my four decades as a journalist in Connecticut, I rarely had to worry about my safety or retaliation from state and local officials I covered. I know I was privileged to work in the U.S. with freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment. But journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa says her native country, the Philippines, was also a democracy with a Bill of Rights modeled on our own. Despite those safeguards, President Rodrigo Duterte consolidated power starting in 2016 to emerge as a dictator. Ressa and her news outlet Rappler reported fearlessly on the extra-judicial killings ordered by Duterte -– perhaps as many as 30,000. Soon he targeted her. Ressa told Jon Stewart on “The Weekly Show” podcast March 6 that Duterte supporters conducted an #ArrestMariaRessa campaign for two years on social media, leading to 90 hate messages an hour. She was then arrested 10 times for tax evasion, cyberlibel and other crimes and is still fighting two cases before the Supreme Court of the Philippines. Ressa chronicled this frightening campaign of intimidation in her 2022 book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future.” She will bring her advocacy for a free press and democracy to Hartford on April 14 when the organization of which I am president, the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government (CFOG), honors her with our Walter Cronkite Freedom of Information Award. We all have much to learn from Maria Ressa. In 2021, she was awarded the Peace Prize for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Now a professor at Columbia University, she has warned of parallels from the Philippines that she sees in some actions taken by U.S. President Donald J. Trump and the rising influence of “broligarchs” like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and her Princeton University classmate Jeff Bezos. “This is the danger of the moment,’’ she told Stewart. “The only way we fight back is with facts and the law.” Ressa has also spoken around the world of the destabilizing dangers of online disinformation, fueling the rise of dictators. “Studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts,” she said in 2022. “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy.” She told Stewart that Americans need to stand up before our rights are gone. “America’s values have shifted,’’ she said. “Is this the world we want?” Ressa’s words have struck a chord with us at CFOG. Our mission is to educate the public about the importance of government transparency and having a strong Freedom of Information Act. Besides honoring Ressa on April 14, we’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Connecticut’s FOI law, which enables state residents to attend public meetings and access public records. Stewart asked Ressa what gave her the courage to stand up to a dictator. “I felt like if I had run, then my life was a lie,’’ she said. Kate Farrish, a former Hartford Courant city editor, is an assistant professor-in-residence in the University of Connecticut Journalism Department. ...read more read less