March 06, 2025

Best New Thinking: Tyranny’s Most Dangerous Foe

40 minutes

2024 Prize winner María Teresa Ronderos advocates for honest, smart journalism to fight misinformation and uphold democracy in the digital age.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their media or the journalists that produce it. Literally, you can’t have one without the other—and today most of us have too little of both.

María Teresa Ronderos is trying to change that.

She is an accomplished Colombian investigative journalist, co-founder of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), and a recently announced winner of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

Ronderos believes that the only way to defeat the misinformation and disinformation that corrode our democracies is with honest, deeply sourced, smart journalism. She also believes that if social media is too often the bête noire of both democracy and journalism, information technology properly used is the best antidote. Overall, she believes that good journalism is not only still possible, but is more essential than ever.

Do you agree?

This episode was originally published on December 5, 2024.

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