'How to Stand Up to a Dictator' dissects how disinformation can kill democracies

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa thinks the world is facing a sort of World War III – especially as it relates to information. Her new book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, details the relationship between trust, truth and democracy, and how social media's pull to inflammatory falsehoods can threaten that delicate balance. In this episode, she tells NPR's Scott Simon how the Philippines have become "a testing ground for attacks against America," and how investigative reporting on the matter is worth the risks it poses.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Really quick, before we get into it,
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1:03.1	Okay, on to the show. The journalist Maria Ressa is one of those people out here who are not only
1:09.4	talking the talk, but walking the walk
1:11.7	in the face of grave danger to herself.
1:14.9	And that's easy to say in the abstract, but I think it's hard for folks here in the U.S.
1:18.3	to really grasp how popular former president Rodrigo Duterte still is in the Philippines,
1:23.9	despite his numerous human rights violations.
1:26.7	Reyes has got a new book out called How to Stand Up to a Dictator, part memoir, part big picture
1:31.2	examination of how we got to this place where democracy is shrinking globally.
1:36.0	But NPR Scott Simon also asks her in this interview something that I'd been dying to know,
1:40.0	which is when it'd be so much easier to maybe chill and hide out in the U.S. or something for a bit,
1:45.6	what keeps her walking the walk?
	...

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