The great woman theory of media history: Maria Ressa, the neoliberal influencer brand and US-Philippine elite centrism

Drawing on the insights of Bollmer and Guinness (Citation2024), we define the “Ressa Brand” as a conflation of an individual human subject with the logics of marketing, individual libertarianism, and “social responsibility.” This model of influencer is different from those that merely seek attention for the objective of commodification such as endorsement, marketing, and branded content. It is also different from being a journalist-influencer as content creator for various media platforms (Leinonen, Citation2022). In Ressa’s instance, the influencer brand derives its success from the commingling of selfhood with the structure and function of a corporation as central to Ressa’s self-representation. Although she started out as a journalist, her later public identity leveraged other forms of social, economic, and financial power when she became CEO and president of media website, Rappler. Her self-branding appears to compete with, and is not secondary to, the profile and practices of her news organization. By examining the projection of her supposed leadership and entrepreneurial qualities, it is possible to compare Ressa’s brand trajectory with those of global celebrity CEOs such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Jeff Bezos, whose valorized identities promote the notion that their “genius” has nothing to do with the labor of a struggling and precarious multitude—labor that these figureheads have often appropriated (van Krieken, Citation2019, p. 161; Bollmer & Guinness, Citation2024, p. 180).