New York Times media columnist Ben Smith’s latest contains some fair criticisms of Ronan Farrow’s reporting, which the former BuzzFeed News chief claims embodies the weaknesses of “resistance journalism.”
Although Smith curiously doesn’t mention Farrow’s greatest journalistic faux pas, he and Jane Mayer’s uncritical reporting of the nearly debunked Debbie Ramirez allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, he does point out that Farrow could have been more thorough in two instances of corroborating other sexual assault allegations.
But one of Smith’s central critiques, namely that Farrow embellished the evidence backing his reporting on the “conspiracy” to silence those coming forward about convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, doesn’t quite stick. And Smith’s most potentially damning claim against Farrow’s reporting makes the least sense.
Smith writes:
“But Mr. Farrow appears to have misinterpreted Mr. Merrill’s call. Mr. Merrill said at the time that Mrs. Clinton was preparing to do a documentary film with Mr. Weinstein, and the Clinton camp was trying to find out if damaging reporting was about to be published about the producer. He had no way of proving it, but another reporter he spoke to at the time about Mr. Weinstein shared with me text messages that back Mr. Merrill’s account, and contradict Mr. Farrow’s. ‘We’re about to do business with him unless this is real,’ Mr. Merrill wrote the other reporter on July 6. In other words, Mr. Merrill was trying to protect his boss, not Mr. Weinstein.”
If this were true, it would undermine Farrow’s credibility in a much deeper way than any mere corroborative oversight or his being burned by a source. But it seems as though Smith did exactly with what he charged Farrow: relying on a mere portion of the evidence to hint at something more sinister than the most plausible explanation.
Long before he was a journalist, Farrow worked for Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Although Farrow doesn’t talk much about his own political leanings, his inner circles, both personally and professionally, have always skewed liberal. Prior to the release of his book Catch and Kill, there was little evidence to believe that he and Clinton had anything less than a good working relationship.
Prior to the drama of his Weinstein reporting, Farrow had secured agreements to interview every living Secretary of State for his first book, War on Peace, a study of American diplomacy. In Catch and Kill, Farrow doesn’t just charge that Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told Farrow that his reporting on Weinstein posed a “concern” for their camp but also that Clinton then reneged on her promise to sit for an interview with him.
“Over the ensuing weeks, every attempt to lock a date for the interview yielded another terse note that she’s become suddenly unavailable,” Farrow wrote in his book of the aftermath of the call with Merrill. “She’s injured her foot. She was too tired. Clinton, meanwhile, was becoming one of the most easily available interviews in all of politics.”
Only after the New Yorker published his Weinstein expose and Clinton came out with a generic statement of condemnation against the disgraced producer did Merrill allow Farrow a “hastily scheduled” call with her after all.
In a vacuum, this wouldn’t be evidence enough that Clinton specifically leveraged her interview to initiate a quid pro quo in the hopes of silencing Farrow’s reporting. But Smith’s floated theory, that Merrill was merely trying to ascertain whether Clinton should disassociate with Weinstein, makes no sense at all. At least two people, Tina Brown and Lena Dunham, had warned Clinton of Weinstein’s behavior before it became public knowledge, so it’s not as though Farrow had something substantially new to inform Merrill.
Furthermore, if Smith’s version of events were right, we’d expect Clinton’s camp to have gone ballistic over Farrow’s version of events at the time it was published. But that’s not what happened. Instead, most everyone went radio silent, with Merrill issuing a piecemeal denial that Clinton had agreed to do a documentary with Weinstein, a prominent donor and family friend for decades prior.
If Smith’s theory were true, then how do we explain the suddenly suspended interview agreement? Given everything else we know, I don’t see how we can.
Farrow’s reporting may not always be perfect, but he chased the story too many journalists, be them bootlickers or simply bad, were too scared to track down. While his peers pushed debunked conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda, and smear jobs of private civilians, Farrow was putting his own life on the line to vet thoroughly and corroborate truths about the monsters of the ruling class.
Smith’s charge that Farrow misrepresented Clinton’s concerns about his Weinstein reporting simply does not hold up, and anyone charging Farrow as a conspiracy theorist ought to remember that.
