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Pavel Kanygin, a veteran reporter at Novaya Gazeta, told the Guardian: “It feels unreal. This is a great encouragement for us all, the last few months have been very difficult for Russian journalism, we had a feeling we are all approaching a tragic ending. We were running out of hope.
“I hope this prize will help to protect us against attacks from the authorities. This is an award that is important not just for us, but the whole Russian independent journalist community.
“Muratov is a living legend. He is very demanding but fair. Always wants us to go the extra mile, he is so passionate about his work.”
Speaking to the Russian news agency Tass, Muratov said of the prize: “I can’t take credit for this. This is Novaya Gazeta’s. It is that of those who died defending the right of people to freedom of speech. Now that they are no longer with us, they [the Nobel committee] probably decided that I should tell it to everyone.”
Muratov then proceeded to list journalists murdered in Russia for their work: “It’s for Igor Domnikov, it’s for Yura Shchekochikhin, it’s for Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, it’s for Nastya Baburova, it’s for Natasha Estemirova, it’s for Stas Markelov. This is for them.”
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Ressa: 'A world without facts means a world without truth and trust'
Responding to the award in an interview with her news site Rappler, Ressa said:
I don’t think this is me, I think this is Rappler. I have – we have – all along said this since 2016, that that we are fighting for facts.
And when we live in a world where facts are debatable, when the world’s largest distributor of news prioritises the spread of lies laced with anger and hate, and spreads it faster and further than facts, then journalism becomes activism.
And that’s the transformation that we’ve gone through in Rappler ... How do we do what we do? How can journalists continue the mission of journalism? Why is it so difficult to continue telling the community, telling the world, what the facts are, right?
So in a battle for facts, I guess what this just shows is that that the Nobel peace prize committee realised that a world without facts means a world without truth and trust.
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Agence-France Presse has this profile of Maria Ressa:
Veteran Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, 58, has become a symbol of the fight for press freedom in an era of strongmen leaders.
The former CNN bureau chief set up news website Rappler in 2012, bringing together multimedia reporting and social media to offer an edgy take on Philippine current events and a critical eye on the government of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Ressa and Rappler have faced multiple criminal charges and investigations after publishing stories critical of Duterte and his bloody drug war.
She had already been named a Time Person of the Year in 2018 for her work on press freedom, but the arrests further grew her international profile and drew more attention to her case.
Her reporting has unleashed what media advocates say is a grinding series of criminal charges, two arrests and a deluge of online threats against her and Rappler.
The website has had to fight for survival as Duterte’s government has accused it of violating a constitutional ban on foreign ownership in securing funding, as well as libel and tax evasion. Duterte has also attacked Rappler by name, calling it a “fake news outlet”, over a story about one of his closest aides.
Ressa has remained based in the Philippines and continued to speak out against Duterte’s government despite the risks.
“I’m not a sole reporter,” Ressa told AFP in an interview last year. “My job is to hold up the ceiling, it has been for a while... so that our folks can continue working.”
The most recent case saw a second libel charge against Ressa dismissed in August. Another libel charge against her was dismissed in June.
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Muratov: 'It's madness over here right now'
Responding to the news, Muratov told the Telegram news channel Podyom:
I am laughing. I didn’t expect it at all. It’s madness over here right now. I saw a call from Norway, but I thought it was some unwanted call.
Here’s what I will say: we will continue to represent Russian journalism, which is now being suppressed. That’s all. We will try to help people who are now labelled as ‘foreign agents’, who are being attacked and expelled from the country.
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Reporting on the award of the 2021 peace prize to their founder, Maria Ressa, Rappler said:
Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021 on Friday, October 8, in an unprecedented recognition of journalism’s role in today’s world.
They won the prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Ressa has been the target of attacks for her media organization’s critical coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and a key leader in the global fight against disinformation.
This is the first Nobel Prize for a Filipino. In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize went to former US Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a team of climate scientists which included former Ateneo president Fr Jett Villarin.
The award-giving body also acknowledged Muratov for his decades of defending “freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions.”
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Annoucing the award, the Nobel committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said:
Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda. Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press, it will be difficult to successfully promote fraternity between nations, disarmament and a better world order to succeed in our time.
Rappler, the news website founded by Ressa in 2012 “has focused critical attention on the [President Rodrigo] Duterte regime’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign,” the committee said, adding that Ressa and Rappler “have also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.”
Muratov was one of the founders of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1993. The committee said the newspaper was “the most independent newspaper in Russia today, with a fundamentally critical attitude towards power”.
It added: “The newspaper’s fact-based journalism and professional integrity have made it an important source of information on censurable aspects of Russian society rarely mentioned by other media.”
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Dmitry Muratov is a Russian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as “the only truly critical newspaper with national influence in Russia today”, which he edited between 1995 and 2017.
Muratov won a CPJ international press freedom award in 2007 for his courage in defending press freedom in the face of attacks, threats and imprisonment.
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Maria Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist and author, the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who spent nearly two decades as an investigative reporter in south-east Asia for CNN.
In 2020 she was convicted of cyberlibel under a controversial Philippine law against cybercrime, a move widely condemned by rights groups and journalists as an attack on press freedom.
The Guardian published this editoral about Ressa last year, calling her a “courageous journalist” and her conviction a move “designed to chill the media”.
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Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel peace prize
The 2021 Nobel peace price has been awarded to the journalists and free speech activists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia.
The committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, says the awards have been made for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
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And here is the committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, preparing for her announcement:
#NobelPeacePrize committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen preparing in the committee room before the announcement. Stay tuned!
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2021
Credit: © The Norwegian Nobel Institute. Photo: Geir Anders Rybakken Ørslien#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/jpOueUFvpb
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The Nobel peace prize in numbers, courtesy of the committee, while we wait for the announcement of this year’s winner, now due in a little over 10 minutes’ time:
- 101 Nobel peace prizes have been awarded between 1901 and 2020.
- 25 organisations have been honoured.
- 2 peace prizes have been divided between three persons.
- 17 women have been awarded the Nobel peace prize.
- 1 peace prize laureate, Le Duc Tho, has declined the prize.
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Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, will be reading out this year’s winner in Oslo in a little over 20 minutes’ time.
This was her announcing last year’s laureate – and their reaction:
It will forever be a great honour that WFP was awarded the #NobelPeacePrize in 2020.
— World Food Programme (@WFP) October 7, 2021
But there's no resting on our laurels when millions still go to bed hungry every night.
Without peace, we cannot end hunger. And while there is hunger, we will never have a peaceful world. pic.twitter.com/2R63CtUGWG
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A reminder, if any were needed, that while everybody has their favourites, the Nobel committee regularly chooses a peace prize laureate no one was really expecting:
My retro-prediction: predictions about the #NobelPeacePrize have a spectacularly poor track record. https://t.co/6mAmTZZJ2J
— Bruno Tertrais (@BrunoTertrais) October 7, 2021
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So far this week, on Monday the Nobel committee awarded the prize in medicine to the Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries about how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
The Nobel prize in physics went on Tuesday to Sykuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, whose work found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
On Wednesday Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan were named as laureates of the Nobel prize for chemistry for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.
On Thursday the Nobel prize for literature was awarded to the British-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, recognised for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee”.
And on Monday next week the prize for outstanding work in the field of economics will be awarded.
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Favourites
Last year’s winner of the the award and $1m cash prize was the World Food Programme for its efforts to combat global hunger, particularly in areas of conflict.
This year, according to bookies.com, the favouries are:
World Health Organization (including Covax and Gavi, the vaccine alliance) 7/4
Reporters Without Borders 10/1
Alexei Navalny 12/1
Greta Thunberg 12/1
Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya 12/1
UNFCCC 12/1
Nathan Law Kwun-chung 16/1
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights 16/1
Bill Gates 20/1
Joe Biden 20/1
But bear in mind the Nobel committee is famously unpredictable ...
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The full list of nominations is kept secret, but nominators are free to disclose them. In recent years, Norway’s MPs have tended to release names of their nominees in advance – six of the last seven winners appeared on those lists.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee – five individuals appointed by the Norwegian parliament, often retired politicians, lawyers and academics – choose the winner (and can make their own nominations).
They meet once a month after nominations close on 31 January each year, counselled by a group of permanent advisers and other experts. They try to reach a consensus, but if they can’t then their decision is by majority vote.
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This year, there are 329 candidates for the peace prize, the Nobel committee has said. How do nominations work?
According to the will of the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who founded the awards, the prize should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses”.
Prospective laureates can be nominated by members of governments and parliaments; current heads of state; university professors of history, social sciences, law and philosophy; and former Nobel peace prize laureates, among others. The full list is kept locked away in a vault for 50 years.
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Welcome
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the 2021 Nobel peace prize, whose winner is due to be announced at a ceremony in Oslo in an hour’s time, at 11am CET.
We’ll be bringing you news of the buildup, the result and the reaction to the award of what is probably the world’s best-known prize. Previous laureates include Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Lio Xiaobo and Mikhail Gorbachev.
This year’s nominees include the environmental activist Greta Thunberg, the Belarusian human rights activist and politician Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya and the jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
Organisations nominated include Black Lives Matter, the World Health Organization, the Covax vaccine sharing body, and the press freedom groups Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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