Maria Ressa who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize co-founded 'Rappler' which is a _________.

Question

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Correct — option (4), Digital media company for investigative journalism. Rappler is an online news organisation based in the Philippines. It began as a Facebook page called MovePH in August 2011 and became a full website on 1 January 2012, established by Maria Ressa together with three other women founders and a starting team of about a dozen journalists and developers. It exists only on the internet — there is no newspaper and no broadcast channel behind it — and its reputation rests on investigative reporting, which is precisely the work the Nobel committee had in view. Ressa's own background explains the emphasis: she holds Filipino and American citizenship, ran CNN's Jakarta bureau from 1995 to 2005, and spent close to two decades as the network's lead investigative reporter in Asia specialising in the study of terrorist networks. The prize the stem refers to was announced on 8 October 2021. Ressa shared the Nobel Peace Prize for that year with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov of Novaya Gazeta, and the citation was 'for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace'. They were the first journalists to receive the Peace Prize since 1935. The pairing is the point of the award and worth carrying: the committee honoured two editors working under governments hostile to independent reporting, one in South-East Asia and one in Russia, and framed press freedom as a condition of peace rather than as a separate liberal value. For the purposes of this question the fill-in-the-blank has only one defensible completion, because Rappler is a news website and nothing else, and the option that says so is option (4). Note the paper's Marathi column spells the fourth option's first word डीजिटल; it is reproduced as printed.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Nothing in Rappler's history has anything to do with music; the option works purely on the sound of the name, which an English-speaking candidate reads as though it were connected with rap. Guessing from what a proper noun sounds like is a habit worth breaking, because examiners exploit it deliberately and it fails in both directions — a name that sounds Indian may belong to a foreign body and a name that sounds technical may belong to a cultural one. The reliable route here is the one the stem itself offers: it tells you that the person concerned won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Peace Prize is not given for music. Reading the stem's own clues before the options is the general defence against a question of this construction.  (b) This confuses two different Nobel Prizes. The Peace Prize, which Maria Ressa shared with Dmitry Muratov in 2021, is awarded in Oslo by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and goes to work for fraternity between nations, the reduction of standing armies and the holding of peace congresses; the Nobel Prize in Literature is a separate award, announced in Stockholm, and in the same year of 2021 it went to Abdulrazak Gurnah. A candidate who registers only that a writer of some kind won a Nobel Prize can slide from the Peace Prize to the Literature Prize without noticing, and end up describing a news website as a literary body. The two prizes are announced in the same week each October, which makes the confusion easier and the distinction more worth learning.  (c) This is the most plausible of the three wrong options and the most instructive. Rappler was in fact founded by four women, and the Peace Prize has gone to campaigners for women's and children's rights before — Malala Yousafzai shared it with Kailash Satyarthi in 2014, and Nadia Murad shared it with Denis Mukwege in 2018 for work against sexual violence in war — so a candidate reasoning from the laureate's sex towards the nature of her organisation is following a pattern that has sometimes been right. It is wrong here. The 2021 citation names freedom of expression as the ground of the award, and Rappler is a news site, not an advocacy body for women. The lesson is to answer from the citation rather than from the profile of the person: the Nobel committee states in one sentence what it is rewarding, and that sentence is usually the whole answer to any question about the prize.

Concept: The Nobel Peace Prize is the only one of the Nobel awards decided outside Sweden: under Alfred Nobel's will the committee is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and the prize is presented in Oslo, while the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature are awarded in Stockholm, as is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which was established later and is not one of the original prizes. The Peace Prize may go to individuals or to organisations, which is why bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations and the World Food Programme appear among its laureates. In 2021 it went to two working journalists, Maria Ressa of Rappler in the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Novaya Gazeta in Russia, and the committee's citation tied their work directly to democracy: freedom of expression, it said, is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace. They were the first journalists honoured since 1935, and the award was widely read as a statement about the pressure on independent media in many countries rather than about the two recipients alone. Rappler itself is a product of that environment. It was built for the internet from the beginning, it grew out of a Facebook page, and its investigative reporting on the conduct of government in the Philippines has repeatedly brought it into conflict with the authorities.

State PCS 2021 Q89 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q89 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer