Ronan Farrow is no stranger to the rough and tumble of investigative journalism. His exposés on sexual abuse that helped to inspire the #MeToo movement have led to him being trailed by private detectives employed by his most famous target – Harvey Weinstein – and to accusations from his former employer, NBC News, that he told “outright lies”.
But the New Yorker reporter has seldom come under such sustained and sharp attack as he did on Sunday night from that other behemoth of New York media – the New York Times.
The paper’s media columnist, Ben Smith, took a deep dive into the body of work that has propelled Farrow to being arguably the most famous investigative reporter in America. He found him wanting.
Dissecting several of Farrow’s most eye-catching stories for the New Yorker and in his bestselling book on the Weinstein scandal, Catch and Kill, Smith questioned the rigorousness on occasion of the reporter’s sourcing. He suggested that Farrow was drawn to “narratives that are irresistibly cinematic”, and at times conspiratorial, but failed to deliver the facts to back them up.
Smith praised the writer for breaking “some of the defining stories of our time”, especially relating to Weinstein who was convicted of rape in February and sentenced to 23 years in prison, in no small part on the back of Farrow’s reporting. Smith also made clear that his review of Farrow’s work did not find him to be a fabulist.
“He does not make things up,” he wrote.
But Smith, a former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News who is himself no stranger to journalistic controversy, said “some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun”.
The takedown of Farrow was striking on several levels. It was notable that a reporter at the top of the business, who won a Pulitzer prize for his work on Weinstein, should have his work subjected to such forensic examination and be accused of “shakiness at its foundations”.
It was also notable that the New Yorker, the magazine that boasts one of the world’s most legendary fact-checking operations, was by extension called into question. That the inquiry came from the Times, whose reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were also rewarded with Pulitzers for their revelations about Weinstein, gave the column an added twist.
On Monday morning, the New Yorker struck back with a 16-part Twitter thread from Michael Luo, the editor of its website, that was pointedly retweeted by Farrow.
Luo subjected Smith’s article to the Smith treatment, and ended up with the same conclusion, accusing the columnist of doing “the same thing he accuses Ronan of – sanding the inconvenient edges off of facts in order to suit the narrative he wants to deliver”.
Luo said the magazine had given Smith detailed responses that contradicted his criticisms, but they were not used in the column. He concluded: “We take corrections seriously and would be happy to correct something if it were shown to be wrong. But Ben has not done that here. We are proud of Ronan Farrow’s reporting, and we stand by it.”
Farrow later added his own dissection of Smith’s dissection of his journalism.
“I stand by my reporting,” he said.
Smith sought to poke holes in several of Farrow’s most important exposés. He went into detail about a May 2018 article in which the reporter delved into the leaking of documents relating to Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, suggesting other key files on Cohen had gone missing from a government database.
“Two years after publication, little of Mr Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents,” Smith wrote.
“This is not true,” Luo replied tersely in his Twitter thread.
On the revelations about sexual impropriety for which Farrow is most celebrated, Smith accused the reporter of cutting corners to make his narrative more dramatic. He referenced Lucia Evans, one of Weinstein’s accusers, who was intended to be a key witness at the film mogul’s New York trial.
Smith said that Farrow glossed over weaknesses in Evans’ account that later led the judge to dismiss that charge.
Luo responded to that criticism that later revelations in the case “does not make our reporting any less diligent”.
Farrow, the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, has always said that he quit NBC News and took his Weinstein story to the New Yorker because the TV network refused to back his investigation, even though he had two women prepared to go on the record about sexual misconduct by the film producer.
Smith wrote that he was shown by an NBC employee what was billed as the final draft of Farrow’s TV script on the Weinstein scandal, and it allegedly contained not a single on-the-record interview.
Farrow rejected that claim on Twitter, saying that “there were at least two women named or willing to be named,” though he did concede that he misspoke about his TV transcript in a radio interview.
Wider reaction to Smith’s column was predictably varied. The Times faced some backlash, with the paper being accused of “nitpicking” and engaging in a “hit piece”.
Other commentators decried Smith’s framing of his criticism of Farrow as being symptomatic of what he called “resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump”.
Jesse Eisinger, a senior journalist at ProPublica, said the suggestion was “silly and inaccurate”.
But other prominent media observers said Smith had raised issues of accountability around Farrow’s reporting.
“Muscular debunking work” was how Erik Wemple, the media critic of the Washington Post, described it.