Authoritarian leaders are undermining the media and democratic institutions at the peril of peace, Dmitry Muratov, a joint winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, said on December 9 ahead of the award ceremony in Norway's capital.
Muratov, editor in chief of independent Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta, and Maria Ressa of the Filipino news website Rappler won the award “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said when announcing the prize in October.
"Lack of belief in democracy means that, with time, people turn their backs on democracy, you will get a dictator, and dictatorship leads to war," Muratov told a news conference in Oslo.
Some authorities and governments “invest in lies and not in journalism,” he added.
“I'm fully aware that this prize is for the whole journalist community. We are going through a hardship now," said Muratov, who has been Novaya gazeta’s editor in chief for 24 years.
The newspaper is one of Russia's few remaining independent media outlets.
Since its founding in 1993, six of its journalists have been killed, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose reporting exposed high-level corruption in Russia and rights abuses in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya.
Ressa told the press that media worldwide should join forces in “fighting for facts” amid threats to press freedoms.
She is a fierce critic of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who is not eligible to run again when the country votes in May.
"It is going to be impossible to have integrity of elections if you don't have integrity of facts and right now that is the case," Ressa said, referring to elections in the Philippines and elsewhere.
She also accused social media platforms of “amplifying” lies over facts.
Ressa was convicted of libel last year and sentenced to jail in a decision condemned by press freedom advocates. She currently is out on bail but faces seven active legal cases.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said that the prize was “to underscore the importance of information in our society today.”
“A healthy society and democracy (are) dependent on trustworthy information so that the public at large [and] politicians can base their decisions and debates on facts-based information,” Reiss-Andersen said.
“There’s so much information in society today that is not trustworthy, is disinformation, is propaganda, is fake news.”
Ressa and Muratov are due to receive the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10.
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