We Need A Universal Declaration Of Human Rights For Information
We Need A Universal Declaration Of Human Rights For Information
Thoughts from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.
On Friday evening, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in journalism. Muratov spoke last, and in Russian, but his words were exactly what you would expect from a tough, grizzled editor who has presided over the investigative newspaper Novoya Gazeta since its launch in 1993 (except between 2017 and 2019). In this period, six of his journalists were murdered. He had earlier said the award was really for them.
Muratov said of journalists,
“Yes, we growl and bite. Yes, we have sharp teeth and strong grip. But we are the prerequisite for progress. We are the antidote against tyranny.”
And he ended his speech with this line, “I want journalists to die old.”
Incidentally, Muratov’s newspaper was set up from the prize money that Mikhail Gorbachev got for his Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Here’s the full text of his acceptance speech in English.
Earlier in the evening, it was the turn of Maria Ressa, the editor of The Phillippines website Rappler.com to give her acceptance speech for the prize.
What I appreciated about her speech was that it wasn’t just about the world of journalism, but about the information ecosystem we all inhabit:
“Without facts you can’t have truth,
Without truth you can’t have trust,
Without trust … we have no shared reality, no democracy.”
Ressa could be the patron saint of Media Buddhi.
A little later in her speech she said,
“An invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem. And the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to prevent humanity from doing its worst.”
Let’s think of that for a moment. Ressa called for something like a Universal Declaration of Humans Rights to deal with our information problem. I’d spoken about the exact same thing in March 2019 while at Stanford University in my piece, The solution to digital pollution is a global ‘Information Consensus’. I’d subtitled the piece, “Think of it as a Universal Declaration of Human Rights…for information.”
The piece was well received within my circle, but Ressa calling for the same thing on the evening she received her Nobel Prize for Peace carries some serious weight. I’ll be tracking this space closely.
For now, here’s the rest of Ressa’s call to action:
"It’s an arms race in our information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts. We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts."
Here’s the full text of her acceptance speech.
Here’s the video of the Nobel Peace award ceremony and the two speeches. Start watching at around the 50 minute mark.