Maria Ressa, CEO of online news site Rappler, has apologized for mistakenly saying that ABS-CBN has “11 million” employees in an interview with ABC News Australia’s The World.
“Apologies to @abcnews & @bevvo14. In our Thursday night interview, I made a mistake. @ABSCBN has 11,000 workers,” wrote Ressa on Twitter.
She reasoned that the error was because “my mind raced ahead to market cap when I was there, which was in hundreds of millions of dollars. The constant gov’t attacks have chipped away 67% of its stock price.”
A short clip of the interview made the rounds online, earning mixed reactions from the netizens.
In a separate tweet, Ressa gave a link to the full interview and expressed disappointment at how others used the blunder to attack her and Rappler.
“That error has been used by very nice Filipinos to call me ugly, incite to hate, and to attack Rappler. The error was all mine. Sad that you have nothing better to do while our freedoms are being eroded.”
In the interview, Ressa talked about the repercussions of the National Telecommunications decision against ABS-CBN to halt its broadcast operations, which she believes is a “death knell of press freedom.”
