GEOFF BENNETT: Nobel Peace Prize laureate and investigative journalist Maria Ressa has long fought for global press freedom.

Her book "How to Stand Up to a Dictator" detailed her experience running the news site Rappler under the increasingly autocratic regime of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

She recently sat down with Amna Nawaz to discuss parallels she's seeing between the Philippines and the U.S. under President Trump.

It's part of our new series On Democracy, which focuses on the laws, institutions and norms that have shaped this country and the challenges they face today.

AMNA NAWAZ: Maria, welcome back to the "News Hour."

Thank you so much for joining us.

MARIA RESSA, CEO, Rappler: Thanks for having me.

AMNA NAWAZ: So there's been a lot of concerns you have seen about President Trump's continuing attacks on the press and concerns about a loss of press freedom.

I want you to start by just comparing what you lived through, what you documented, what you covered under Duterte with what we have seen in the first several weeks of this second Trump administration so far.

MARIA RESSA: It's exactly what we have lived through, except accelerated.

It's incredible how fast it's going.

And part of that is organization, right?

But what we did in the Philippines is, within six months -- the Constitution of the Philippines is patterned after the United States.

We have three branches of government and a powerful executive.

But within six months of the election of Rodrigo Duterte, of him taking office, all of the checks and balances had collapsed.

He was an all-powerful - - the most powerful leader the country had ever known.

And critical to that, crucial to that is silencing the press and the justice system, the court system, right, because -- and I think that's what we're beginning to see right now.

AMNA NAWAZ: Let me ask you about a few individual things we have seen.

You have obviously seen the president go after specific news networks.

He's also opened a probe into PBS, we should note.

He's also blocked access for the Associated Press, known as the AP, for their refusal to call it just the Gulf of America, as he wants.

They call it the Gulf of Mexico and say he wants to change the name.

Now, the AP, we should note, serves thousands of news organizations.

They have a reporter in every single statehouse in America, hundreds of countries -- rather, over 100 countries across the world.

What does it say to you that he's going after the AP?

What's at stake in their lawsuit against the president here?

MARIA RESSA: It's not just press freedom that's at stake, right?

And, again, let me ground it first in what happened in the Philippines.

Our president then went after the largest newspaper, the largest television station, and then online.

We were the largest.

We were number three.

But go big, go fast, take them down quickly, make an example.

I was the example of a journalist.

I had had, oh, my gosh, a long career.

I had headed the largest network in the Philippines after almost 20 years with CNN.

And then, when the charges came -- so first social media, the attacks came bottom up.

You say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact.

And it was that journalist equals criminal.

Two years before I was actually arrested, they trended that, the network that was created online, so the propaganda.

Then, a year later, we had the first criminal charges, 21 of them, and then, by two years later, by 2019, I was arrested.

And then it was 10 criminal charges in a little over a year.

Look, what you're seeing is death by 1,000 cuts of democracy.

This is exactly what I had written about in the book.

And, originally, I was speaking to Filipinos, but it is a cautionary tale for every democracy, where technology is the spark that allows populism to become authoritarianism and to shift over.

I think we're seeing this now.

AMNA NAWAZ: So, if the press is under attack here, Maria, as an observer watching this all unfold, what do you make of the way that the press has responded, in particular, the fact that there's been a major news organization in ABC that's already settled a lawsuit with the president?

It's reported that CBS would likely do the same.

What do you make of that?

MARIA RESSA: Don't voluntarily give up your rights, right?

I mean, again, in -- I will give you our example in the Philippines, where the first newspaper gave up -- the television station gave up largest - - it lost its franchise or license to operate.

And guess what?

It never regained it even after the time of Duterte.

Little Rappler with, about 100, 120 people, we stood up.

And it was difficult.

It was frightening, but we're still here, right?

A point in time when I faced over a century in jail, but I'm still here.

And, after 2021, I had lost some of my rights.

I wasn't allowed to travel, for example, but now here I am.

I'm in New York City teaching at Colombia University, right?

So I guess what I'm saying is, hold the line is the phrase we use, because it's connected to the rights that you deserve as a citizen.

And if you do not hold the line at this crucial moment -- this is the moment when you are strongest -- it will only - - you will only get weaker over time.

And it isn't just the journalists, because journalists are the front lines in this, but the question is to every single citizen in America.

It's the question I threw in the book, how to stand up to a dictator.

And that question is simple.

What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

Because if you don't have facts, you cannot -- and I have said this over and over since 2016.

Without facts, you can't have truth.

Without truth, you can't have trust.

Without these, we have no shared reality.

You can't solve any problem, let alone existential ones like climate change.

You can't have journalism.

You can't have democracy.

And in a system like that, only a dictatorship wins.

AMNA NAWAZ: Maria, you're drawing the comparisons here based on your lived experience, of course, but there are folks who will say, look, the U.S. is not the Philippines.

Trump is not Duterte.

Our democracy is not the same as the one that you lived in.

What do you say to that, the idea that this is somehow immune, our system, from the same things that the Philippines fell prey to?

MARIA RESSA: I think I have two -- two ways to respond to that.

The first is, it isn't just the Philippines.

There is a dictator's playbook, and you can look first at Russia, actually, even before that, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, right, with Putin taking office.

And the first step is really to get elected, once you're elected, to crush the systems of checks and balances, and then replace them with your own -- we're starting to call them the broligarchy, because it's far more potent, the tech guys are more potent than just normal oligarchies.

This is political largess, political patronage.

You have to decide the world you want to live in.

You have to decide whether rule of law exists.

You cannot normalize impunity.

And if you don't, over time, we normalize that and you lose more and more of your rights.

But here's a positive note.

Rodrigo Duterte's term ended.

He had one six-year term.

He did try to extend.

And perhaps if the military had supported him, I wouldn't be here.

But we now have another president and those 10 criminal cases that I have had, I have now won eight of those 10 and two left.

I still have to ask the Supreme Court for approval to travel, but we're here.

It's alarming to see it happening all over again.

AMNA NAWAZ: We should point out, Maria, that the majority of Americans say they don't even trust the media right now, that we have seen a decline in that trust over years.

And many people like to see the president go after the press in the way that he does.

They will hear this conversation and say, good, I'm glad he's doing what he's doing.

What has the independent press ever done for me?

What would you say to them?

MARIA RESSA: The role of journalists in a country, in a democracy like the Philippines, like the United States is to hold power to account.

and I believe that is why -- I mean, you're not going to have an influencer or a content creator stand up to a dictator.

You're not going to have someone have a set of principles, of standards and ethics that actually pushes against their own self-interest.

We're seeing all of these begin to fall.

But here's the thing.

Part of what triggered that is the technology, the public information ecosystem we live in.

Journalists and news organizations have been under attack from the very beginning.

So your lack of faith in that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You lose journalism the way we practice it, you lose democracy.

AMNA NAWAZ: Maria Ressa, always such a pleasure to speak with you.

Thank you so much for making the time.