Ronan Farrow is an interesting topic in the journalism world right now.
If you haven’t heard of him before, he is a 32-year-old journalist whose reporting mostly appears in The New Yorker. He entered the media industry with a leg up because he’s the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, and a lot of people say that precludes him from ever being treated based solely on his merit. I mean… I think that’s true to a degree, BUT, that doesn’t mean he can’t also be a great journalist.
But… it’s reason to make one more wary of him.
His breakout piece was a 2017 series that exposed Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual abuse. That led to him publish a book last year on the process of covering Weinstein, Catch and Kill, in which he also talks about the broader subject of how difficult it is to pursue stories on powerful men in general, because of the resources (money, connections, etc.) they have at their disposal. The series won awards and the book is a bestseller.
But now some other journalists are saying, nope, nuh uh. Enough with Ronan Farrow.
First was this column in the New York Times* by Ben Smith. He levies some pretty big accusations of sloppy journalism against Ronan, and I walked away from it feeling pretty confident that Ronan got away with some shit.
But it also left a funny taste in my mouth with this bit, which I’ll get back to later in this post:
His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.
– Ben Smith, “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”
(I have beef with that.)
Anyway, then Matt Lauer jumped on the bandwagon. (Here’s a refresher on what’s been going on with him.) He wrote an op-ed posted on Mediaite, under the headline: “Why Ronan Farrow Is Indeed Too Good to Be True,” and lists a bunch of ways in which he agrees with Ben’s take.
The tone of that op-ed is insufferable, so I’m not posting any excerpts. I think Matt Lauer is an egotistical assface, but you also can’t help seeing the legitimacy in some of what he says, so in my case I walked away feeling even more dubious of Ronan after reading it.
But THEN, Ashley Feinberg from Slate wrote a follow-up on Ben’s piece and Matt’s follow-up. And yes, of course it follows in the same headline vein: “Is Ben Smith’s Column About Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”
In this rebuttal she points out inconsistencies and hypocrisies in Ben’s own column in the NYT. And she addresses that point of Ben’s that I said I would come back to, re: what he’s dubbed “resistance journalism.”
I think it’s strange and dangerous to purport that journalism that calls out people in positions of power is intrinsically shoddy, rushed, and emotional.
…so I’m ending this post on that note for now, because it’s already gotten preeeeetty lengthy and I have a couple other things I’m itching to post. But if a convo gets started, this will be revived!
Words For Friends 