Nobel winner: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’

Next week, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov receive their Nobel peace prizes. In a rare interview, Muratov says he fears the world is sliding towards fascism

The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila.

Nearly a century on, Ressa is one of two journalists who will step onto the Nobel stage in Oslo next Friday. She is currently facing jail for “cyberlibel” in the Philippines while the other recipient Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, is standing guard over one of the last independent newspapers in an increasingly dictatorial Russia.

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This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.