A senior executive at Now News has resigned, citing “turbulent times” for Hong Kong’s media, media reports said.
Annie Cheng, vice president of the broadcaster’s news department, tendered her resignation on Monday, according to the reports.
Her resignation comes after the station failed to carry a story in May about a top national security officer being caught in an unlicensed massage parlour raid, Citizen News reported.
Cheng’s last day is expected to be in mid-August. HKFP has reached out to Now News for comment.
‘Most turbulent times’
The executive told colleagues she had been mulling the decision for the past year, CitizenNews reported. “The time has come for me to let this go,” she wrote in a message to her department, describing recent months as the most trying time for the city’s media.
“Even throughout the most turbulent times for the press in 2021, we still stood firm at our posts… this is something that should make everyone proud,” she wrote to her newsroom.
She thanked her colleagues for what she called beautiful memories of the last 16 years and cited a biblical verse: “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.”
Her resignation comes as the Hong Kong Journalists Association called 2020 “the worst year so far” for the city’s press freedoms in its annual report last Friday. It cited a cascade of events impacting the press since China imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong in June 2020.
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