New York Times Media Columnist Ben Smith Delivers Take Down of Ronan Farrow’s ‘Misleading’ Reporting

Sunday evening, Ben Smith, the former Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed and now New York Times media columnist, delivered a scathing assessment of the journalistic endeavors of Ronan Farrow, pointing out numerous inaccuracies and unfounded conclusions in Farrow’s recent work.

“Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?” the headline asks, and Smith then spends several thousand words mostly answering that question in the affirmative.

While giving Farrow credit for having “delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact,” and specifically for his tenacious Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein, Smith also observes that “some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun”:

Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.

Among Farrow’s stories that Smith cites as examples were one claiming that U.S. Treasury Department records regarding Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump‘s personal lawyer, had gone missing from a database in 2018. This was inaccurate; the records were merely on restricted access, “a longstanding practice to prevent leaks.”

Smith also lists several failures to follow up with witnesses who could have corroborated accusations of sexual assault, and — arguably a more problematic lapse — in the case of former NBC host Matt Lauer, omissions of witnesses who weakened or contradicted those accusations.

“It’s impossible, however, to go back and answer the question of whether Mr. Farrow’s explosive early reporting would have carried such power if he’d been more rigorous and taken care to show what he knew and what he didn’t,” wrote Smith. “Is the cost of a more dramatic story worth paying? Because this much is certain: There is a cost.”

Smith also targets Farrow’s predilection for finding a conspiracy underneath every stone he turns over, pointing out the shaky foundation under Farrow’s claims that both NBC and Hillary Clinton both sought to kill his Weinstein story.

Smith’s article naturally drew a flood of comments, including NBC’s Dylan Byers, who mused that it might be “the most important media column I’ve read.”

UPDATE: Ronan Farrow and the editor of NewYorker.com have responded to Smith’s piece and defended their reporting. Read that here.