“All In” host Chris Hayes came out swinging Monday night against his NBC bosses and in support of former colleague Ronan Farrow in his clash with the network over his sexual harassment investigation that helped propel the Me Too movement.
Farrow argues in his new book, “Catch and Kill,” that NBC ultimately quashed his reporting on alleged sexual assault by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein because management was intimidated by Weinstein’s power. He also suggests that NBC News was worried that his Weinstein reporting would unearth allegations of sexual assault and harassment against the network’s own former star, Matt Lauer.
NBC President Noah Oppenheim released a scathing attack Monday on Farrow, denying the New Yorker writer’s accusations and calling them a “conspiracy theory.”
Despite the back and forth, “one thing ... is indisputable,” declared Hayes, “Ronan Farrow walked out of NBC News after working on the Weinstein story, and within two months published an incredible story in The New Yorker that not only won a Pulitzer but helped trigger a massive social and cultural reckoning that continues to this day.”
That’s the “kind of journalism you want to do as a journalist,” he said. But the reporting struggled to see the light of day because the “path of least resistance for those in power was not to cross Weinstein and his army of friends and lawyers,” Hayes noted.
The same thing goes, Hayes said, for the “many, many, many other powerful predators we’ve come to know about.”
It’s the very “ease of that path” of least resistance, he warned, “that makes it the enemy of the kind of work that we, as journalists, are supposed to do.”
Check it out in the video above.