In less than three years Ronan Farrow has become the most widely admired journalist in America for a series of scoops that began with an explosive story about Harvey Weinstein and was followed with reports that brought down a media titan and the attorney-general of New York.
The son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, he was called the avenging angel of the MeToo movement: rumours that one of his reports was due could make the stocks of media companies tremble before he had even published it.
Now that glittering record has been challenged by a newspaper columnist, who allegedly found flaws in Farrow’s work and suggests that his style of “resistance reporting” poses a danger to American journalism. Published by The New York Times under the headline “Is Ronan Farrow too good to be true?” these allegations set off a debate that recalled past controversies over New Journalism and the “novelistic” reporting styles of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.
Ben Smith, the columnist who dared to challenge Farrow, cut his teeth as a political journalist on several New York papers and at the website Politico before he was hired by Buzzfeed to bring serious reporting to a site dominated by clickbait. In 2017 Smith was obliged to defend his decision to release a dossier of unverified information compiled by the former spy Christopher Steele on Donald Trump, arguing that readers deserved to see the document that was circulating in the media and in Washington.
Hired by The New York Times in January, Smith’s assault on Farrow focused on a handful of possible errors.
In Farrow’s 2017 story about Weinstein, he quoted an accuser named Lucia Stoller who alleges that Weinstein attacked her when she was a college student, adding that she told friends of the attack. One friend would later tell police that Ms Stoller, who was then Ms Evans, had suggested that her encounter with Weinstein was consensual. The detective’s attempt to conceal this evidence from a prosecutor eventually led a judge to dismiss the Stoller allegations from the criminal case.
Smith argues that Farrow’s reporting smoothed over possible contradictions, “making a narrative virtue of a reporting liability”. He argues that a similar problem arises in Farrow’s book, Catch and Kill, in which he reports that the NBC broadcaster Matt Lauer assaulted a junior employee who ran from his office and told a producer what had happened. Smith said he interviewed this producer, who did not recall the scene as it was told. In Smith’s telling, Farrow smooths the edges of his stories to play to the “resistance movement” of Metoo protesters and campaigners.
Farrow had begun investigating Weinstein while working at NBC, but when he felt his work being stymied, he took his story to The New Yorker. Writers and editors at The New Yorker defended Farrow. Ken Auletta, who tried several times to report on assault allegations against Weinstein, said Farrow had succeeded where others had failed for years.
Michael Luo, a New Yorker editor, wrote on Twitter that they would make a correction if anything in Farrow’s reporting was shown to be untrue. “Ben has not done that here.” It was noted, however, that Smith’s article had already been subjected to two small corrections since its publication.
The Times