Nobel peace prize for journalists is a call to action in dark times
The committee’s choice was a strategic act as the world tilts toward fascism. The last time a working journalist was honoured, it was to an anti-Nazi German editor as World War II loomed.
When Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa and Russian editor Dmitry Muratov were named Nobel peace prize laureates last week for fighting courageously to “safeguard freedom of expression”, the Norwegian Nobel Committee described them as “representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions”.
The committee’s choice was a strategic act. It has been 85 years since a working journalist won the peace prize. While he languished in a Nazi concentration camp, German editor Carl von Ossietzky was made a laureate in 1936 “for his burning love for freedom of thought and expression and his valuable contribution to the cause of peace”.
