NBC News Chairman Andy Lack issued a memo and 11-page report to his staff on Monday defending the network’s decision last summer to not move forward on a story by journalist Ronan Farrow about allegations of sexual harassment by movie producer Harvey Weinstein.
Farrow ultimately took the story to the New Yorker where it ran last fall just days after the New York Times published its own hard-hitting piece on Weinstein. Both pieces won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Since the publication of Farrow’s story, NBC CMCSA, +0.85% has been subject to criticism in media circles that it squandered an opportunity.
That criticism took on greater urgency last Thursday when Rich McHugh, Farrow’s producer on the story at NBC News, told the New York Times that the leadership at the network had impeded their efforts to break the story. McHugh accused the network of a “massive breach of journalistic integrity.” McHugh recently left his job in the investigative unit.
NBC News denied those accusations and in Lack’s Monday memo and report goes further in defending its decision to let Farrow take the story elsewhere after spending eight months on it at NBC.
“We spent eight months pursuing the story but at the end of that time, NBC News—like many others before us—did not have a single victim or witness willing to go on the record…. So we had nothing yet fit for broadcast,” Lack wrote in his memo to staff. Farrow “did not agree with that standard,” Lack added, and that is when the network agreed to his request to take the story to another outlet.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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