Time magazine has chosen to award the prestigious title of “Person of the Year 2018” to a group of journalists who risk their lives and imprisonment in order to defend the truth.
I always dreamed of becoming a journalist — I even wrote it in a school essay: I imagined it as a kind of 'avenger' capable of righting wrongs and injustices.Enzo Biagi
Just yesterday we witnessed the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nadia Murad, a witness to the genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of Isis, and to Denis Mukwege, the doctor who has treated more than 50,000 women raped by Congolese soldiers. She bears the scars; he has healed them — but both have seen with their own eyes that human beings are capable of committing inhuman acts. And both have cried out to the rest of the world. This is what we need: witnesses, people who describe to us what we cannot — or will not — see.
The journalist is the witness par excellence. It is through their eyes that we witness events happening far from us. This is why their role is so delicate: we might say they are like a window that allows us to look out at the world. On the one hand, if the glass is not clean, the image we see does not correspond to reality. On the other, there are those who would prefer the shutters were never opened at all.
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It is for their pursuit of truth, obstructed by those who do not want it to spread, that "the guardians" have been chosen by Time as "Person of the Year 2018". They are Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered; Maria Ressa, who is fighting to prevent her news website from being shut down in the Philippines; the newsroom of the American daily Capital Gazette, which survived a shooting; and Burmese journalists Wa Lone and Kyav Soe Oo, sentenced to seven years in prison.
On 2 October of this year, Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to obtain a simple document. His partner was waiting outside, but she never saw him again. According to the investigations, a group of Saudi army soldiers was waiting for him inside the building: the government itself has admitted its involvement. The country ranks 169th out of 180 in the press freedom index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. Khashoggi, however, refused to be shackled — he was not afraid to speak about the harshness of the royal family's policies, to the point that his articles were seen as offensive but, above all, inconvenient.
Maria Ressa is not even intimidated by her own president, Rodrigo Duterte, who has declared that "Rappler publishes fake news". The news website, which started out with just twelve reporters, has today become the most powerful weapon in the fight for press freedom in the Philippines, and despite the government doing everything it can to get rid of it — from revoking its licence to launching a tax evasion investigation, to death threats against the newsroom — its chief executive has no intention of giving up. "I came of age in 1968, I watched the authoritarian governments of south-east Asia gradually transform into democracies. I would hate, at the end of my career, to witness the opposite."
The very young survivors of the shooting at the high school in Parkland, Florida, who were featured on the cover of the April issue, were also candidates for the title of Time person of the year. They gave rise to the #NeverAgain movement, demanding loudly that gun laws in the United States be tightened so that students no longer have to fear dying from a bullet. They will surely be proud that the recognition was awarded to the Capital Gazette newsroom, which in June lived through an experience similar to their own: a man, resentful over an article about his harassment of a former classmate and bitter after unsuccessfully filing a defamation lawsuit, went to the offices and opened fire, killing five members of staff. The following day, in spite of everything, the new issue of the newspaper was on the shelves of every newsstand.
While Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege fight for the perpetrators of rape and violence in their countries to be brought to justice, there are journalists being imprisoned without having committed any crime. Such is the case of Wa Lone and Kyav Soe Oo, Burmese reporters for the news agency Reuters, sentenced to seven years in prison for violating secrecy laws when in reality their only "crime" was to have exposed the crimes committed by Myanmar's army against the Rohingya minority, prompting the United Nations to call for a genocide trial against the military.
It is true that a great deal of fake news circulates, but it is equally true that the motto "It's fake news!" — so beloved by United States president Donald Trump, who was certain he would become Person of the Year — is nothing more than a weapon to discredit the media. Journalism has certainly changed, and will continue to evolve; perhaps the printed press will succumb, but those who hunger for writing, for transparency, for giving a voice to those who have none, will never be satisfied.
