- Synced and corrected by chamallow - - www.addic7ed.com -
This week on Vice:
journalism under attack on the streets of Manila.
We haven't been at this crime scene for five minutes,
and already we're getting a call that there's been another killing in Manila.
And then, turning the tide
against extinction in the Congo.
Go, go, go!
We are not animals!
Freedom of the press is under fire in America
with the new president and his administration
openly undermining both the legitimacy
and the value of media.
They so poison the minds of people
by writing false stories.
They are the enemy of the people.
Now, an independent and unrestricted press
is the very bedrock of a free and democratic society.
To learn more about where press freedom stands
here and around the world,
we spoke with legendary journalist Carl Bernstein,
whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Watergate scandal
toppled a corrupt administration,
leading to President Nixon's resignation.
You broke one of the biggest stories
in our country's history.
How has the climate to practice journalism
changed since that time?
It is toxic today.
We're in a state of a kind
of cultural civic war in this country.
So much of the media is opposition party.
Absolute dishonest, absolute scum.
Remember that. Scum. Scum.
What is similar, incidentally,
between Watergate and what we see now,
is that President Nixon tried to make
the conduct of the press the issue in Watergate
instead of the conduct of the president and his men.
Trump is doing exactly the same,
but in a much more aggressive, inhibiting way
than Nixon ever did.
What is the state of press freedom globally?
Under attack. Press freedom is under attack,
partly because those who hold power,
increasingly, uh, are authoritarian.
President Trump's attacks on the press
pale in comparison to a global war on journalism
where authoritarian regimes threaten
and imprison reporters.
If you cut off the flow of free information
and the best obtainable version of the truth,
these people are gonna stay in power.
It's not an accident that in the Philippines, uh,
you see what is happening.
To understand what happens when freedom
of the press is under attack by a government,
we look to the Philippines,
which is the single deadliest place to be a journalist
outside of war zones Iraq and Syria.
The country's president, Rodrigo Duterte,
is waging a war on the media, while simultaneously
executing a ruthless war on drugs
that's left thousands dead in the streets.
We followed one reporter in Manila covering the drug war.
We're at the Manila police headquarters
to meet up with a journalist named Aie Balagtas See.
She works the night beat here,
so we're going to join her tonight.
Anyone who wants to do night-crawling,
they hang out here.
In the mornings, it's just, like, full of laptops,
full of reporters doing their daily grind stuff.
And so what's the plan tonight?
Every night, someone dies. You just have to wait.
They just got a call that there's at least one person who was killed.
It's an hour away, and they say if you wait that long,
it's very possible that the body's gonna be taken away by then.
It's widely believed that President Duterte orders the police to kill
suspected drug dealers and users indiscriminately,
so journalists race to investigate the crime scenes
before all evidence is removed.
- They got it already? - Yeah.
Okay.
This killing fit the profile
of most extrajudicial killings
being executed in the Philippines.
Was he on any kind of official list
as a drug user or a drug dealer?
You know?
Heart's murder fit the template of countless others.
First, the government puts the victim on a watch list,
and soon after, they're gunned down.
Since Duterte took office in 2016,
around 9,000 people have been brutally murdered
in the streets without trial.
Many of them are executed by assassins working with the police
as part of their crackdown on drugs.
This means that it's often the journalists themselves
who are left trying to investigate the cases.
We followed Aie as she continued her reporting.
- Okay. - And...
Heart's sister insisted it was the police
who pulled her from their home and shot her
as part of their war on drugs,
a common claim among witnesses.
Each night that we followed Aie,
calls poured in from across the city.
We haven't been at this crime scene for five minutes,
and already we're getting a call
that there's been another killing in Manila,
so we're gonna head back there right now.
It quickly became clear
that the story the police told Aie
didn't match what witnesses around us
were reporting at the crime scene.
So, apparently the computer store around the corner
took a photo of the victim, of the body,
and there wasn't a gun there.
And now, of course, there's a gun there.
So, Aie is going with him to see if it's true.
One photo is of before the cops swarmed the body,
and there was no gun, apparently, in the victim's hand.
And then after the cops were... had all gathered there,
and there was a gun.
Despite the photos, Aie said they were
too low-quality to publish as evidence.
In fact, she didn't publish this story at all,
likely due to a culture of fear among reporters
which often leads to self-censorship.
Investigative journalists have endured
a long history of violence in the Philippines.
Not only have there been more deaths of journalists here
than anywhere outside of war zones,
in 2009, the largest massacre of reporters
in world history was committed here.
Thirty-two were killed,
and to date, there have been no convictions.
Melinda Quintos De Jesus has been a journalist
in the Philippines for more than 30 years.
She explained why journalists here often self-censor.
What are some of the statistics
that convey how dangerous it is to be a journalist in the Philippines?
A total of 154 journalists,
counted since 1986,
have been killed because of the work that they do.
In general, are these murders of journalists
ever investigated? Is anyone ever convicted?
So, we've had two convictions.
- Only two? - Only two clear convictions.
What happens when a journalist attacks Duterte, or calls him out?
They can expect to have a barrage of threats...
questioning the legitimacy of all mainstream media.
But worse, they have gone as far as basically saying,
"We know where you live. We know where your family is."
In our short time in the Philippines,
we saw killings happen each night,
but reporters continued to cover the crimes,
despite working under threat of execution
by their own president.
I... Jesus Christ. The body's still here.
Oh my God. Wow.
Have other people been killed like this around here?
And now they're searching the body
to see if he has any drugs or anything on him.
So far, they haven't found any drugs.
We met with Peter Bouckaert,
who believes that threats against journalists here
are as real as the threats against drug users.
He was just sitting here, and another motorcycle came by,
and shot him twice in the face.
What is your sense of who the assailants were
and why this guy was killed?
My first suspects would be the police.
Why do journalists here self-censor?
I mean, what's the danger in reporting more than what they do?
When the president says just because they're journalists,
doesn't protect you from being assassinated, he means it.
You know, if you go after
one of the most prominent congresswomen in this country,
and tell her that she's gonna rot in jail
for investigating these killings,
ordinary journalists are going to be very afraid.
Peter was referring to Senator Leila De Lima,
who launched an investigation into extrajudicial killings
when Duterte was the mayor of Davao City.
The criticism did not go unnoticed by Duterte,
who lashed out against De Lima publicly.
We've been to a few crime scenes this week,
and we've seen, you know, what they look like,
and these cases mirror one another,
at least in our experience.
Who are these assailants?
This could only be members of death squads.
The president keeps on saying that up to the last day of his term,
killings... would continue.
It's plain and simple murder,
which is against our law.
How much more can the public willing to take?
Can we take 100,000? Can we take a million?
The general populace seems now to accept the killings,
because of the persistent and continued...
... propaganda.
With his propaganda machine running so successfully,
Duterte has an approval rating of nearly 80 percent.
One of his strategies is to turn government officials,
like the chief of police,
into celebrities.
PNP chief,
Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa!
While the public continues to celebrate
Duterte's war on drugs, just weeks after we left the Philippines,
his police force arrested his number-one critic.
Senator De Lima was arrested in February of 2017
on drug charges, accusations she says
are completely baseless.
With Duterte's strongest opposition now behind bars,
the importance of local journalism is more pressing than ever.
What's at stake if a government threatens reporters,
silences them, intimidates them to the point of self-censorship?
I think there always have been threats
to the press to varying degrees.
Often, those threats
- can threaten journalists' lives. - Mm-hmm.
Once you start to close down
that ability to present information
that the government or others might find, uh, unpalatable,
that is the slippery slope.
For people to make informed decisions about their own lives,
we need truthful, fact-based information,
and only a free press can do that.
Obstructing a free press
is the first step toward tyranny.
Over the last two decades, the gorilla population
in the Democratic Republic of Congo
was in danger of disappearing.
Today, however, they're on the verge of a remarkable comeback.
Ben Anderson has been covering the story for years,
and he returned to the DRC to see what's being done
to stop this slide towards extinction.
They look when you say their name.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
At the rangers' headquarters in Eastern Congo,
there is a gorilla orphanage.
Andre Bauma has been protecting the gorillas for almost 20 years.
The biggest one? Yeah.
Baby gorillas fetch a huge price on the black market,
and poachers have killed entire families to capture just one of them.
Poaching had contributed to a dwindling population,
which many feared could lead to extinction.
How do you feel, seeing them inside an enclosure like this?
Virunga is one of Africa's bio-diverse national parks,
home to a quarter of the critically endangered mountain gorillas.
The rangers here risk their lives to protect them.
So, I stumbled across a graveyard just like this 13 or 14 years ago,
This is for rangers who have been killed,
and back then, one in seven rangers had been killed doing their job.
Came back 10 years ago,
and they actually put me through their whole training program
and made me become a kind of honorary Avanced Force Ranger.
I got a green beret and jacket, went out on patrol with them.
And back then it looked... bleak.
It looked like they were fighting a losing battle,
and that the hippos and gorillas we were seeing
could be the last ones here,
because there were so many rebels and so few rangers.
And the world just wasn't paying attention.
So I always wanted to come back to show what heroes these rangers are.
And they still face serious physical danger,
because there are still loads of armed groups within the park.
Over 150 rangers have died protecting the park.
Five more were killed by rebels just two weeks ago.
But now the park itself is under threat.
Illegal charcoal production,
one of the rebels' main sources of income,
has caused mass deforestation
and presents a new threat to the wildlife here.
Innocent Mburanumwe leads
armed patrols looking for illegal charcoal producers.
Within a few kilometers of their base,
the rangers hear the sound of trees being chopped.
Yeah.
The poachers escaped.
Right.
Charcoal is made by chopping down trees
and slowly burning them in an easily assembled kiln.
It's then transported out of the forest and sold
to the nearly four million people who live around the park.
For the rebels, it's a hugely lucrative business.
Another kiln. You can still smell the burning wood,
so I think this is very recently used.
And this just shows how widespread it is.
And this is right under the noses of the rangers.
Big area's been cleared.
So, another kiln. This may not look like much,
but thousands of people are doing this across the park.
Some people think the value of this trade is $35 million a year.
So, that gives you a sense of how much damage is being done.
Charcoal production has destroyed
at least 30,000 square kilometers of forest in Africa.
To see the scope of this deforestation,
we flew with the head of Virunga,
a Belgian prince named Emmanuel De Merode...
Seat belts.
... who took over in 2008.
Emmanuel's solution is to completely reinvent
the local economy.
Central to this is the construction of eight hydroelectric plants
that will provide cheap power to the entire population here,
using Virunga's own natural resources
to end the deforestation that is causing such devastation.
Virunga National Park can create
between a hundred and 120 megawatts.
That's... 20 times
what the whole city of Goma,
a city of a million people, is getting at the moment.
You know, with the electricity that can be generated from Virunga,
we can create between 80 and 120,000 jobs
in the province.
The Congolese Military, the UN Peacekeeping Forces,
the biggest in the world,
haven't been able to defeat the rebel groups militarily.
But you think you could just make them choose to...
to stop fighting because there's a better alternative for them.
Yeah, they're here to make money.
Until you provide an alternative,
you're not gonna resolve the conflict.
But in the short term, you're removing
a large source of income for those armed groups,
so you're... you're making some serious enemies.
Well, you know, it's not a popularity contest. That... that's true.
That's an understatement.
Emmanuel was shot four times immediately after filing a complaint
against an oil company exploring the park.
He was lucky to survive.
So, each one of these turbines will produce more electricity
than the whole city of Goma's getting at the moment.
So, really, it's a huge transformation for the area.
Congo remains one of the most violent places on Earth,
but there are real signs of progress here.
Thanks to the efforts of the rangers,
the long-endangered species that live here could actually survive.
At another park ranger headquarters at Kahuzi-Biega,
I found the man who trained me 11 years ago, Elie Mundima.
Ah! How are you?
- Good to see you again. - How are you?
How are you? Good to see you.
He took me out on patrol to see
how the gorilla population has fared since I was last here.
You promised last time, and you kept your promise.
Eleven years ago, we found a lone silverback gorilla.
This time, Elie showed me something
that would've been unimaginable back then.
I see 12.
Twelve?
- Unbelievable. - Yeah.
There were less than 700 mountain gorillas
left in the world when I was here in 2006.
Now there are approximately a thousand.
This progress is remarkable.
And although the gorillas are still endangered,
it looks, for the first time in a long time,
as if there is a good chance it will continue.
- He can't hear me. - Yeah.
You make to do... you make a wave.
- Good. - Very good.
- Synced and corrected by chamallow - - www.addic7ed.com -