60 minutes of canard

What she is now fighting for is for loud foreign allies to apply enough pressure to halt the charges against her and the online news outfit on the pretext of political persecution.

Rappler founder Maria Ressa had retreated to her native United States and appeared to have taken up the cudgels for the yellow mob in demonizing President Rody Duterte. Her latest attack was the fable that the life of a journalist in the Philippines is “worse than being in a war zone,” which of course is unadulterated hogwash.

Her other claims in an interview with American broadcast giant CBS’ “60 Minutes” are similarly outlandish, such as the supposed death threats she gets “just for reporting the truth on the country’s populist president Rodrigo Duterte and his government.”

“This is far worse than any war zone that I’ve been in,” she propounded. “In a war zone, you know exactly where the threats are coming from. We’ve been living through three years of this kind of hell,” went her total lie.

When asked about the details of what she claimed as death threats, Ressa said the vicious messages she was talking about were spread on social media, many from what Ressa says are “fake” accounts run by paid trolls.

“I’ve been called every single animal you can think of… (and threatened of) sexual attacks, rape, murder, beheading. At one point, I was getting 90 hate messages per hour,” Ressa claimed.

The cyber libel law, on which a complaint against Ressa is based on, however, addresses such online attacks, but which she never seemed to have sought legal action for, but she found convenient use for these as ammunitions in her US tour.

The lies went on and on during the primetime American TV program and she again repeated the manufactured figure of 27,000 deaths in the war on drugs.

The number was plucked out of thin air by Rody’s chief critic Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV for retelling in anti-Duterte groups, governments and human rights bodies. It was also concocted to back up a “crime against humanity” case that his henchman Jude Sabio filed before the International Criminal Court.

“If you look at our own Commission on Human Rights and the UN’s (United Nations) estimate of the number of people killed in the drug war, since July 2016, at least 27,000 people killed,” she claimed.

She kept on insisting that she has been arrested twice on harassment charges meant to “pound me into silence.”

At one point she claimed the National Bureau of Investigation agents sent to serve an arrest warrant to her for cyber libel filed by a private businessman were sent by government to intimidate her and the Rappler staff.

“The head of that arresting group told our reporter, ‘Be silent, or you’re next.’ And that is exactly what the government is doing, systematically. Be silent, or you’re next,” she recounted.

Ressa kept up her ramblings as she capitalized on her being a supposed target of repression even as she spreads her venomous fiction unmolested.

The truth is that due to duplicity in trying to skirt around the requirements of the law, her online news outfit Rappler is on a losing legal battle and faces possible closure.

What she is now fighting for is for loud foreign allies to apply enough pressure to halt the charges against her and the online news outfit on the pretext of political persecution.

“I have done nothing except to be a journalist and I will not stop being a journalist,” she claimed.

Ressa is on the same boat with detained Sen. Leila de Lima in that they cry oppression for misdeeds that the law requires they answer for.

De Lima is under litigation for alleged drug trafficking, while Ressa is in trouble for a possible breach of the anti-dummy and the cyber libel laws.

Instead of answering the charges in court, both have brought their battle to the international stage, claiming a systematic effort to silence them.

Silence? Both have been the source of the most malevolent rackets that can be imagined against Rody.