Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks support RSF’s work
In the course of promoting the release of “The Post” in Europe, the film’s director, Steven Spielberg and its leading actors, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, have met with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in a show of support for the NGO and the causes it defends: press freedom and quality journalism.
The issue of quality journalism is at the heart of “The Post,” which has just been released in the United States and will be released in France under the title of “Pentagon Papers” on 24 January. Set in the early 1970s, it shows how the Washington Post newspaper managed to publish the leaked Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971.
RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire met Spielberg, Streep and Hanks in Paris. Peter Price, who chairs the board of RSF USA, also attended the meeting, which was organized as part of a partnership between RSF and Universal Pictures France. It was Price, a former president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, who presented RSF with an Emmy Award for its defence of press freedom.
“That a director such as Steven Spielberg and actors such as Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks have paid such a great tribute to quality journalism at a moment when media freedom is under threat from no less a person than the US President is already extremely important,” Deloire said.
“But they have also used their promotional interviews to demonstrate a commitment to this pillar of democracy that goes far beyond the film’s promotion. Everyone at RSF thanks Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks for this crucial support at a time when journalists who question their governments are being attacked with unprecedented violence.”
When RSF released its 2017 World Press Freedom Index, it organized round-table discussion at the headquarters of the Washington Post moderated by investigative reporter Dana Priest. RSF provided the Washington Post with concrete assistance when one of its reporters, Jason Rezaian, was arbitrarily detained in Iran from July 2014 to January 2016. Deloire and Margaux Ewen, the head of RSF’s Washington bureau, are due to meet with the newspaper’s editors in Washington on 19 January.
RSF is organizing a screening of “The Post” in Paris on 22 January, two days before the film is generally released. “We thank Universal Pictures France and its CEO, Xavier Albert, and Jacques Benloulou, founder of the Trouble Shooter agency, for their support for our cause,” Deloire added.
