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NBC: We didn’t sit on Weinstein story

"The Theft of Our Values"

Over years Weinstein used his bully pulpit, and a public's craving for gossip, to preserve his 'Godly' predatory place in the Hollywood scene.

Network is the latest media outlet to rebut claims that it failed to pursue stories of the Hollywood mogul’s sexual harassment of women.

By MICHAEL CALDERONE

10/11/2017 04:07 PM EDT

Updated 10/11/2017 04:44 PM EDT

NBC News President Noah Oppenheim told staffers at a town hall meeting Wednesday that “the notion that we would try to cover for a powerful person is deeply offensive to all of us.”

[...]

“His ability to punish the bottom line of any publication that stepped out of line was significant,” said Hirschorn. And Weinstein also had the ability to place derogatory stories, Hirschorn said, and "seemed to have a direct line to a number of gossip columns, including ‘Page Six.’”

He also launched a magazine, Talk, with Tina Brown. She recalled Tuesday that "many hacks writing gossip columns or entertainment coverage were on the Miramax payroll" through development deals with the company. But if a gossip reporter didn’t write something Weinstein liked, he could blow up. “I’m the scariest motherf--ker you’ll ever have as an enemy in this town!” Lloyd Grove, who was a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006, recalled Wednesday.

“The ability, through a combination of complicity, fear — illegitimate and legitimate — and money, made it very likely you were not going to be able to get these things in print,” Hirschorn said of the long-whispered allegations. “And once that happened, there was a sense of hopelessness. Why even pursue it? It’s not going to happen.”

Some journalists kept taking stabs at the still-untold story below the surface of all the glitz and glamour.

“Over many years, many news organizations have circled this story and faced a great deal of pressure in doing so,” Ronan Farrow, the author of a blockbuster New Yorker report, said Tuesday night on MSNBC. But it’s what Farrow didn’t say that raised eyebrows inside and outside 30 Rock. Host Rachel Maddow asked Farrow why NBC — the network that identified him just a day earlier on-air as an investigative correspondent — didn’t publish the story. He said to ask NBC News executives.

Farrow, a former daytime MSNBC host who shifted to a reporting role after his show’s 2015 cancellation, said he spent 10 months on the story, beginning at NBC. Accounts have varied over how deep Farrow got in the project at 30 Rock before heading to The New Yorker.

[...]

An NBC source told POLITICO on Tuesday that what Farrow had early on at NBC “was nowhere close” to what appeared in the magazine or The Times. Grove reported that scripts were being “prepared and vetted” at NBC and that Farrow’s reporting was undergoing fact-checking and legal vetting. And Farrow told Maddow on Tuesday night that he had “an explosively reportable piece” while still at NBC and that The New Yorker realized that immediately.

[...]

Oppenheim didn’t address specifically what Farrow had early on at NBC, though it’s been reported he had already obtained a 2015 NYPD recording of Weinstein admitting to groping model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a claim the mogul denied at the time.

The groping incident made tabloid headlines in April 2015, and the New York Daily News even reported at the time that Weinstein’s denial might be contradicted by an NYPD sting tape, which hadn’t surfaced until Farrow’s piece. The same day, entertainment gossip site Defamer — once part of the Gawker Media empire — asked readers for information about Weinstein’s “open secret" and optimistically predicted that “accusations that once existed only as loud whispers were finally being dragged into the light.”

But Battilana Gutierrez was smeared in the gossip pages as a gold digger, and the extent of Weinstein's misdeeds would remain in the dark for years.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/11/harvey-weinstein-accusations-media-243682

See also:

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