NBC’S WIDE ‘OPPEN’
OKs #MeToo prez
NBC News renewed the contract of its controversial president, Noah Oppenheim, who looks poised to succeed Chairman Andy Lack despite weathering a slew of #MeToo scandals at the TV network.
Oppenheim — who has lately been blasted by Ronan Farrow for refusing to publish his explosive story about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct — saw his contract renewed in recent months by the top brass at NBCUniversal, sources told The Post.
Specifics of Oppenheim’s renewal couldn’t be learned, but a source said such contracts are typically renewed for several years at a time. The 40-year-old exec is expected to succeed Lack, who is widely expected to retire after the 2020 presidential election, the source noted. NBC declined to comment. Upon learning Tuesday that Oppenheim’s contract had been renewed, several NBC employees said they were “outraged.”
“We thought both he and Lack were about to be fired,” one NBC insider told The Post. “No one has faith in them. They have made mistake after mistake, have told lies on top of lies. They have given the middle finger to journalism. Now one of them is rewarded with a multimillion-dollar deal? It’s truly heartbreaking. Morale is at an all-time low.”
In his new book, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” published last week, Farrow claimed that under Lack and Oppenheim, NBC spiked a Weinstein story he pitched in 2017 partly because Weinstein had threatened to leak information about alleged sexual misconduct by former “Today” host Matt Lauer.
In the course of writing the book, Farrow heard from exNBC staffer Brooke Nevils, who claims Lauer anally raped her while on assignment during the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. Nevils left NBC with a seven-figure settlement. Once word got out about the rape allegations, Lack and Oppenheim emphasized to NBC employees it was not “an assault” or “criminal,” the book read.
Farrow also published excerpts from an embarrassing article Oppenheim wrote about Harvard’s all-male clubs when he was a student there, concluding that “women who fell [sic] threatened by the clubs’ environments should seek tamer pastures” and that “apparently women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon. They feel desired, not demeaned.”
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Oppenheim repeated his position that Farrow’s Weinstein story hadn’t been ready at the time he pitched it. After NBC rejected the story, Farrow took it to the New Yorker, which published it a month later, in October 2017.
The story won a Pulitzer Prize, and Lauer was fired a month later after an employee accused him of sexual misconduct.
Oppenheim told the Journal he wished Farrow could “just open his mind to the possibility ... That there was not some malicious farreaching conspiracy” to quash his Weinstein story.
Farrow, he added, “might still disagree with some of the decisions that his editor and colleagues and myself have made, but he would perhaps realize we all acted with integrity and only in the interest of upholding the editorial standards that are so important to this place.”