thedailybeast | By the time Farrow pitched New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick
in August, according to multiple sources, he and NBC News investigative
unit producer Rich McHugh, among others, had been pursuing Weinstein’s
alleged serial groping—and worse—of young actresses and female staffers
since the previous December.
Over the course of several months,
scripts were prepared and vetted, and Farrow’s and McHugh’s reporting
was subjected to various layers of both fact-checking and legal reviews,
insiders said, and at one point a senior producer on NBC News’ Friday
night show Dateline carefully re-interviewed many of their sources and witnesses, and concluded they were solid.
The
vetting process lasted weeks and weeks, through much of the summer, but
ended shortly after Kimberley D. Harris, executive vice president and
general counsel of NBC Universal, subjected the material to her own
review. Since Harris oversees the in-house lawyering of all the company
divisions, an NBC source said it would not be unusual for her to review
news division material for potential exposure to litigation. And
although Harris reports to NBC Universal Chief Executive Steve Burke, a
source insisted Burke wasn’t involved in the decision to spike the
Weinstein story.
Indeed, according to this account, Harris never
formally weighed in, because NBC News had already pulled the plug by the
time she finished examining Farrow’s work.
With two such wildly
contradictory versions of why and how NBC News spiked Farrow’s Weinstein
story, it’s difficult to determine what objectively occurred.
But author and New Yorker
media writer Ken Auletta, who has been covering Weinstein for decades
and is among the legions of journalists who’ve tried and failed to
document his casting-couch behavior, also sat for an NBC interview; at
one point, according to witnesses, he turned to the camera and declared:
“This evidence is so overwhelming that if NBC News sits on it, that
will be a scandal.”
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