A discussion on the tragic Maguindanao Massacre in the Philippines and its connection to a political power struggle. The chapter also delves into the lead up to the 2016 election, focusing on Duterte's effective storytelling and exploitation of people's fears to gain support.
Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.
“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”
Show notes:
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