Ronan Farrow details how NBC blocked his initial reports on Harvey Weinstein, threatened to ‘smear’ him
News is breaking that Ronan Farrow’s investigation into the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse was blocked by NBC News and Farrow says the network threatened to “smear” him if he continued reporting on Weinstein, even after he left the network.
The Times post notes that the block came from a producer at “the very highest levels of NBC.”
Harvey Weinstein at the 2011 Time 100 gala photo/ David Shankbone
“Rich McHugh, the producer, who recently left his job in the investigative unit of NBC News, is the first person affiliated with NBC to publicly charge that the network impeded his and Mr. Farrow’s efforts to nail down the story of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct. He called the network’s handling of the matter ‘a massive breach of journalistic integrity.’”
Farrow’s story, which ultimately ran in The New Yorker, was part of a series that ultimately won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, earned him in the prestigious George Polk Award for National Reporting, garnered near-universal praise from his colleagues and sparked the now famous #MeToo movement.
NBC denied the characterization, saying Farrow’s work was not broadcast-ready when the reporter decided to take his reporting to The New Yorker.
The Daily Beast added that they “uncovered new details of how the process went awry, including alleged threats from NBC, back-biting inside the network about who was truly responsible, and a previously unreported ultimatum by Weinstein’s attorneys.
“According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, NBC News General Counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow, threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein.”
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A spokesperson for NBC News, speaking on the condition of anonymity, vigorously denied those allegations. “Absolutely false,” the spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “There’s no truth to that all. There is no chance, in no version of the world, that Susan Weiner would tell Ronan Farrow what he could or could not report on.
“The sole point of the Susan Weiner’s conversation with Farrow, roughly a month after he had left NBC, was to make sure he wasn’t still telling sources that he was working on the story for NBC since he had moved on to The New Yorker.”
