New Year party in Times Square to cheer for press freedom

NEW YORK—Reporters will be the guests of honor at the New Year’s Eve party in New York’s Times Square on Monday (Tuesday in Manila), in what organizers said was a celebration of press freedom after an unusually deadly year for journalists at US news outlets and a challenging one for others around the world.

Rappler reported that its chief executive officer, Maria Ressa, will be among 11 journalists invited as special guests at the New Year’s Eve ball drop program.

The others are Karen Attiah, global opinions editor, The Washington Post; Rebecca Blumenstein, deputy managing editor, The New York Times; Alisyn Camerota, coanchor, CNN New Day; Vladimir Duthiers, correspondent, CBS news and anchor, CBSN; Edward Felsenthal, editor in chief, TIME; Lester Holt, anchor, NBC Nightly News and Dateline NBC; Matt Murray, editor in chief, The Wall Street Journal; Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent and “This Week” coanchor, ABC News; Jon Scott, anchor, Fox Report Weekend on Fox News Channel; and Karen Toulon, senior editor, Bloomberg.

The journalists, together with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which is the official charity honoree of the Times Square New Year’s Eve program, will be pushing the crystal button that will signal the ball drop a minute before midnight. They will share the spotlight with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Joel Simon, CPJ executive director, said the Times Square Alliance approached his group because of “the perception that journalism and journalists in particular are under threat and their role is being questioned.”

Critical work

Simon said the invited journalists represented those who “work hard every day to keep their communities informed and hold the powerful to account.’’

“It’s the freedom to do this critical work that we celebrate,” Simon said.

Tim Tompkins, president of Times Square Alliance, which organizes the annual ball drop, said: “We are honored to have such a respected group of media entities and journalists join us to #CelebratePressFreedom as we ring in the New Year.’’

Simon said Times Square Alliance contacted him in November, several weeks before Time magazine would devote their annual “Person of the Year” issue to several prominent journalists who have faced attacks and hostility.

Among those named by Time as “The Guardians” were Ressa, Khashoggi, and Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters reporters imprisoned by Myanmar for investigating how the country’s security forces killed members of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

Khashoggi slay

Two attacks in particular weighed on organizers as they discussed in autumn whom to give the honor of initiating the ceremonial ball drop, according to Tompkins.

One was the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for the Washington Post and US resident, inside a Saudi Arabian Consulate in Turkey. The other was the mass shooting in June in the newsroom of The Capital, a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in which five employees were killed.

“Throughout the year it’s been a big issue,” Tompkins said in an interview. “Times Square itself is the ultimate agora and public space,” he added, noting that the area was named after the New York Times, and that it was a Times publisher, Adolph Ochs, who began the tradition of the ball drop in 1907.

The button-pressing honor has in previous years gone to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, an Iraq War veteran, US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and singer Lady Gaga. —WITH A REPORT FROM RAPPLER.COM