NBC embarrassed itself this week with its defense of the network’s decision to spike journalist Ronan Farrow’s extensively reported piece on Harvey Weinstein’s admitted history of sexual harassment.
At a company townhall meeting Wednesday, according to a transcript made public by NBC, president of news Noah Oppenheim said the network “supported [Farrow] and gave him resources to report that story over many, many months. The notion that we would try to cover for a powerful person is deeply offensive to all of us.”
NBC’s forced reboot of “Will & Grace” is “offensive to all of us.” What the network did with the Weinstein story, on the other hand, is a scandal.
HuffPost reported that Farrow had been working on the story since January. In March, he obtained the now-famous 2015 recording of Weinstein apologizing to a model for groping her breasts.
Network news executives generally know that sex sells. It sells even more if the sex is salacious and implicates a powerful Hollywood movie mogul.
Related: The culture wars finally ended with Harvey Weinstein
With a slew of alleged victims and a made-for-broadcast audio recording on hand, the only reason NBC would have turned down Farrow’s story was because it had a stake in the outcome.
The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove reported Wednesday that Weinstein “had enjoyed a long business relationship with NBC Universal, and Universal Pictures produced both his seven-Oscar ‘Shakespeare in Love’ in 1998 and 2009’s ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ for instance, while he had co-produced the hit reality-TV show ‘Project Runway’ for the NBC-owned Bravo channel.”
But Oppenheim said during the company townhall that NBC “reached a point over the summer, where as an organization, we didn’t feel that we had all the elements that we needed to air it.”
So, they dropped it completely.
This would be like an architect designing a house, but when he ran out of paper, he abandoned the project.
Sorry, it’s out of my hands!
It’s not as though Farrow hit a wall or NBC expended its resources. HuffPost said Farrow had even opted to hire his own camera crew to continue the job.
It’s not that time had run out. It’s that NBC wasn’t interested.
And yet, after the New York Times broke the news about Weinstein’s predatory behavior and the New Yorker followed up with more details from Farrow, NBC, no longer able to ignore the story, ran the audio of Weinstein begging a model to forgive him for groping her around the clock, as though it were the only thing that mattered.
In what will go down as one of the bravest acts by a journalist, Farrow said on NBC’s cable news arm MSNBC that his story “should have been public earlier” and that, when NBC was at least feigning interest in the subject, it had been deemed “reportable” on several occasions.
Asked why, then, NBC wasn’t the one to air it, Farrow said, “Look, you would have to ask NBC and NBC executives about the details of that story.”
Related: Anthony Bourdain is right about Harvey Weinstein and Hillary Clinton
NBC refused to run a deeply reported story about sex abuse in Hollywood — an “open secret,” according to now-countless people in the industry — but in the last two weeks, the network has really nailed down the details about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supposedly calling President Trump a “moron” behind his back.
During a meeting at the Pentagon in July, according to NBC’s two stories, Trump said he wanted a “tenfold” increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. When the meeting ended, Tillerson is said to have called Trump a “moron.”
Trump, Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and (the media’s favorite) White House chief of staff John Kelly all denied the reports.
“In spite of what someone reported the other day about the president — and I don’t think he would mind me sharing this — what he said to me many, many times and to the group often times, I hear him most say about nuclear weapons is, wouldn’t it be great if we could get rid of them all?” Kelly said Thursday.
The same day that NBC published its report on Trump wanting more nukes, “Today” correspondent Jenna Bush Hager was quoted by People magazine saying that she was grateful to have her twin sister with her after Election Day because they both needed “comfort” following Trump’s win.
NBC will give you that, but it won’t tell you if one of its business partners is cornering women and asking them to watch him shower.
Journalists had a laugh when Trump on Wednesday suggested that perhaps the network should have its “license” revoked.
NBC has no “license” to take away. And now, it has no credibility.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner.
