Philippines orders news site Rappler to shut down, founder says

Ressa, CEO and founder of Rappler, released a statement during the East-West Center’s International Media Conference in Honolulu saying the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (PSEC) had upheld its earlier ruling to revoke the news site’s operating license.A former CNN bureau chief and TIME Person of the Year, Ressa said the team will appeal this decision, “especially since the proceedings were highly irregular.””What does this mean? We have existing legal remedies all the way up to the highest court of the land. It is business as usual for us since in our view, this is not immediately executory without court approval,” Ressa wrote in an internal announcement to Rappler staff.Ressa has been Rappler denied foreign ownership, and said the Philippine Depositary Receipt (PDR), a financial instrument that governs the Omidyar investment, did not give the network any control over the company. It said the arrangement was accepted by the SEC in 2015.CNN has reached out to the Philippine SEC and the Philippine Embassy in the United States but has not yet heard back.In an order released on Wednesday, the Philippine SEC “affirmed and reiterated its earlier finding” from 2018 that Rappler is a “mass media entity” and it had granted control to a foreign entity “through the Philippine Depositary Receipt issued to Omidyar Network.””Rappler and RHC willfully violated the constitution … when they granted Omidyar control,” the order said. “Considering the seriousness and gravity of the infraction, and that it was no less the constitution that was violated, this commission finds and so holds that the penalty of revocation … should be affirmed and sustained.”The ruling comes a day before Duterte leaves office and incoming President In 2020, one of the Philippines’ largest and most influential broadcasting networks, ABS-CBN, was forced off the air and ordered to cease operations after it was denied a new broadcast license.Ressa has often spoken out about the challenges she and Rappler have faced covering news in the Philippines. She has been hit with a host of legal challenges that are widely considered to be politically motivated, including a cyber libel conviction that could see her jailed for six years and alleged tax offenses.”Journalists have been targeted in ways that we’ve never gone through since the days of (Marcos Sr.). In less than two years I’ve had 10 arrest warrants against me and I haven’t done anything different from what I’ve been doing (before),” she told CNN in 2021.