After a two-year reign over the investigative journalism that conquered countless sexual predators in the morass of the #MeToo movement, Ronan Farrow is under fire, right on time to discredit him before he can take on the most crucial sexual assault investigation since 2018.
The original #MeToo movement could only come after the Clinton dynasty was thoroughly vanquished, offering Democrats and eventually Republicans alike a chance to wipe the slate clean. Journalists and liberals finally acknowledged that given the numerous contemporaneously corroborating witnesses backing Juanita Broaddrick’s claims, Bill Clinton was more likely than not a rapist, and soon, it seemed as though the transactional Gloria Steinem standard of stomaching sexual misconduct for utilitarian ends would be vanquished at last.
Heralding our new era was Farrow, the telegenic wonder child of actress Mia Farrow and either Woody Allen or Frank Sinatra, depending on what version of events you believe. Ronan Farrow, himself a onetime Clinton aide at the State Department and a liberal, had mysteriously departed from a cushy gig at NBC News, instead taking his groundbreaking reporting exposing Harvey Weinstein to the New Yorker. The breakup turned out to be permanent, with the magazine hiring Farrow as a regular contributor.
Save for the since debunked Debbie Ramirez allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Farrow’s investigations were remarkably apolitical. He reported on President Trump’s extramarital affairs that culminated in NDAs that likely violated campaign finance laws, but perhaps even more damning were the investigations that exposed CBS boss Les Moonves and Eric Schneiderman, the former liberal star New York attorney general.
As a society, it seemed that people finally understood that sexual assault or harassment proven more likely than not true ought to result in professional consequences. Public outrage finally led to firings, voters rejected Roy Moore at the ballot box in a deeply red state, and the Democratic establishment stuck it to Al Franken. It seemed that the page was finally turned over the Clinton standard.
But then, Democrats saw their last swing vote on the Supreme Court dissipate, marking the beginning of the end. You all know how the story of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh ends, but for the purpose of our current quandary, what’s more important is its implications. Despite the lack of evidence that Kavanaugh and Ford ever even met and many other holes in her story, Democrats treated Ford’s allegation as fact, and soon enough, the polling demonstrating the effect: Everything from the inclination of respondents to believe accusers to the belief that politicians credibly accused of sexual harassment should resign all collapsed after his confirmation.
The final nail in the coffin of our hopes of post-Clintonian redemption came with Tara Reade’s allegation against Joe Biden. Reade’s claim, while credible, may not quite meet the preponderance of the evidence, but that’s not the conversation Democrats decided to have. Most in the party apparatchik have simply pretended that Ford never existed, acting as though the multiple contemporaneously corroborating witnesses backing Reade’s claim are laughable shams of evidence, but some have said the quiet part out loud, admitting that they believe Reade but are willing to accept yet another sexual predator in the White House as long as he beats Trump.
So the press has embarked on a scorched-earth campaign against Reade, gleefully reporting how she had trouble making rent, misrepresented her college career, and may have embellished details about an undeniably violent and abusive relationship. No matter that no one has actually discredited the evidence backing the actual assault claim: The press can paint Reade as a poor, Putin-loving liar, and that’s good enough for them.
In the midst of this environment, Ben Smith came out of nowhere with a piece criticizing Farrow. Some of Smith’s critiques that Farrow failed to explicate his sourcing properly or explain context in his stories were valid, and one point attempting to exonerate Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Weinstein simply made no sense. But most glaring was his refusal to mention Farrow’s most faulty story, the bogus Ramirez allegation.
Whatever prompted the initial report, it can’t hurt Biden to have America’s most well-known reporter on sexual assault allegations against powerful men under fierce scrutiny.
One story critiquing a few aspects of a fellow journalist’s work is a media reporter doing his job. The rest of the media spinning it into a wholesale discrediting of that journalist’s entire career is a hit job. Within 48 hours of Smith’s article, Mediaite published a 4,000-word first-person diatribe against Farrow from Matt Lauer, one of the alleged predators reported on in Farrow’s book Catch and Kill.
In his attempt to discredit Farrow, Lauer gets his NBC buddies still gunning for his return to bash Farrow’s reporting, whines that Farrow never named the sources who corroborated the account of his accuser Brooke Nevills, and reminds us that he slept with a bunch of his subordinates, but he swears it was all consensual.
A lack of corroborative clarity could prove damning for Farrow if he were the first one to ever vet the claims against Lauer. But his book came two years after the first reporters exposed Lauer’s malfeasance. To take Lauer’s claims seriously, you have to pretend that multiple allegations of assault with even more corroborating witnesses simply didn’t exist previously.
It’s absurd but ultimately inevitable that deciding to obliterate the tenets of the #MeToo movement to protect Biden would necessitate the destruction of the journalists that enabled it in the first place. If you still think this is an accident, just consider all of the reporters not currently in the hot seat.
In a vacuum, it’s not as though Farrow doesn’t deserve scrutiny. All reporters, especially those with the most potentially consequential claims, ought to be accountable and transparent. But Farrow failing to explicate clearly which specific of Nevills’s friends he had spoken to is approximately the one-millionth most serious issue plaguing the fourth estate.
It’s not that Farrow is perfect, and on its own, Smith’s piece was fairly even-handed. But does Farrow really deserve this onslaught of outrage when all of the people and organizations listed above haven’t received an iota of the hate?
Of course not, but it’s necessary. Support for Biden has hung on well enough mainly because Reade’s allegation, however credible on its own merits, does not remotely fit a pattern of Biden’s behavior. But another credible allegation would kill his best defense. The smear job of Farrow was just the logical extension of the return to the Clinton era. Don’t look now, but the rehabilitation of Lauer comes next.
