It’s so strange to watch what amounts to religious thinking taking hold of the liberal left. Like sure Q followers are batshit insane, but what do you call thinking that Trump is a guy who is capable of “softening” in response to his trophy wife’s requests? It seems in the category of religious utterances like “everything is part of God’s plan” which you have to be insane to believe, but the repetition of which is a means of ritually driving away the fear that you are not in control of anything that happens to you. Which is something that is becoming pretty clear to a lot of privileged people right now.
Like Trump is a man whose only talent is conning people, so he’s tried to treat the pandemic like a public relations issue and he’ll continue to do so. But because that’s an uncomfortable truth to face, it’s the job of reporters to make up fairy stories about fantasy scenarios where Trump might “soften” to maintain the feeling of normalcy which they are paid to create for their readers.
Holt shit that is an awful article. He wants to Stan for Weinstein, Laurer, and Cohen so picks a few out of context quotes from thousands of words of journalism that won the Pulitzer.
That story is such a weird thing to exist, like of all the things for the NYT to get self-critical about? It seems unlikely this Ben Smith guy opted to write the piece himself and then the attacks on Farrow are so weak that I started getting bored halfway through. For example:
In Mr. Farrow’s telling, by the end of July 2017, he had nailed down the story of Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of sexual predation, and the NBC brass had begun to shut him down. He has said repeatedly that he had at least two women on the record for his story at the time he left NBC for The New Yorker. He told NPR in an interview, “There is no draft of this story that NBC had that had fewer than two named women.” But NBC has disputed that claim, and an NBC employee showed me what he described as the final draft of Mr. Farrow’s script, as of Aug. 7. It had no on-the-record, on-camera interviews. (It did have one strong piece of reporting that Mr. Farrow took to The New Yorker: an audio recording of Mr. Weinstein appearing to confess to an Italian model that he had groped her. )
Smith’s attack on this story:
Two other NBC journalists, neither of whom would speak for the record, expressed a different view, which is shared by network executives: That Mr. Farrow was a talented young reporter with big ambitions but little experience, who didn’t realize how high the standards of proof were, particularly at slow-moving, super-cautious news networks. A normal clash between a young reporter and experienced editors turned toxic.
Mr. Arkin said he agreed with NBC’s view that Mr. Farrow didn’t have the Weinstein story nailed by August 2017, when he took the story to The New Yorker. But Mr. Arkin said he also believed that NBC didn’t really want the story.
The right move would have been to “take a 29-year-old and you hold him by the hand and you walk him through the story,” Mr. Arkin said in a telephone interview. “Instead what they did was they took him out to the deep end and threw him in — and then they said ‘Oh my God, you can’t swim.’”
So the people who claim to disagree with Farrow won’t speak on the record and the guy who does speak on the record agrees with Farrow that NBC wanted to kill the story. Sick expose you’ve got going here dude.
And like everyone knew that Weinstein was a predator, are we really expected to believe that NBC would just love to run the story but oh damn, actually Farrow’s research to date isn’t quite watertight, what a shame, oh well better dump the whole thing? Like it’s beyond fucking obvious that they were reluctant to pick up the story, at worst Farrow’s account of this is slightly exaggerated.
I’ve read his book. He makes it clear they avoided the story. He literally walked across the street and published it in like 2 months. That NYT article is a disgrace.
I made it through the rest of the article and just lol:
Mr. Farrow’s other irresistible conspiracy has even less to support it: that Hillary Clinton, whom Mr. Farrow had once worked for at the State Department, also sought to kill his reporting and protect Mr. Weinstein. In “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow described receiving an “ominous” call from Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, in the summer of 2017 saying his Weinstein reporting was “a concern.” “It’s remarkable,” Mr. Farrow told The Financial Times about Mrs. Clinton during his book tour, “how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centers of power or the sources of funding around them.”
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 anyone can detect the evidence in this second paragraph that Merrill didn’t want Farrow to kill the story, let me know. Is it the bit where he doesn’t text his friend “called Farrow just now and tried to get him to not spill the beans about how Weinstein is a rapist”?