NBC News chairman defends losing of Weinstein story
FOR NEARLY a year, NBC News has combatted a persistent accusation: that it thwarted one of its own reporters and let a blockbuster story — sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein — slip away to another news organisation.
The allegation took on new life last week when the producer who worked on the story at NBC, Rich McHugh, called the network’s failure to air what it knew about Weinstein “a massive breach of journalistic integrity.”
On Monday night, the chairman of NBC News, Andrew Lack, fired back, defending the network’s handling of the Weinstein story in a lengthy memo to his division’s employees. His defence included an extraordinary 10page document that spelled out a detailed timeline of the reporting of the story.
Echoing previous statements by NBC News executives, Lack said that McHugh and reporter Ronan Farrow simply didn’t have enough sources and corroborating information to air a story about Weinstein’s alleged misconduct last August. NBC and Farrow agreed at that point that he could pursue the story on his own. Farrow took his work to the New Yorker magazine, which in October published what became a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of accusations against Weinstein and his efforts to cover them up.
“We spent eight months pursuing the story but at the end of that time, NBC News — like many others before us — still did not have a single victim or witness willing to go on the record,” wrote Lack on Monday in his memo. He noted that actress Rose McGowan, the only woman Farrow had interviewed who was willing to be identified, had “refused to name Weinstein” as her assailant.
“So we had nothing yet fit to broadcast,” Lack wrote. “But Farrow did not agree with that standard. That’s where we parted ways — agreeing to his request to take his reporting to a print outlet that he said was ready to move forward immediately.”
He noted that Farrow’s first New Yorker article cited seven victims by name, including the actresses Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette and Asia Argento, none of whom had offered on-therecord comments when Farrow and NBC split seven weeks earlier.
Lack added one previously unreported detail to NBC’s side of the story: that NBC convened an “independent” panel of three NBC investigative journalists to review Farrow’s work until just before he left the network. He said their conclusion was “unequivocal” — the story wasn’t ready for airing.
To bolster his and NBC’s case, Lack included a document with a detailed timeline of the reporting of the story and developments surrounding it. It also mentions that Weinstein contacted, or tried to contact, Lack and other NBC News executives multiple times while Farrow was reporting the story. The document says Lack rebuffed or ignored Weinstein’s entreaties. — WP-Bloomberg