NBC accused of suppressing Ronan Farrow's Harvey Weinstein exposé and threatening to smear him

The New York Times

The order to put a stop to Farrow's Weinstein reporting came from "the very highest levels of NBC," according to Rich McHugh, the NBC News producer who worked closely with Farrow. He is speaking out to The New York Times after recently leaving the network. Meanwhile, The Daily Beast reports, based on multiple sources, that "NBC News general counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow, threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein." The Daily Beast also reports NBC News president Noah Oppenheim "mentioned to Farrow that Weinstein had raised objections to Farrow’s reporting—even though Farrow had not yet asked Weinstein to comment on the allegations, according to individuals briefed on the meeting." An NBC News spokesperson said, speaking anonymously, the allegation that Farrow was threatened was "absolutely false. There’s no truth to that all. There is no chance, in no version of the world, that Susan Weiner would tell Ronan Farrow what he could or could not report on.” McHugh told The Times that NBC was "resistant" to their Weinstein investigation, which ended up being published in The New Yorker. McHugh called NBC News' handling of their investigation "a massive breach of journalistic integrity.” “Three days before Ronan and I were going to head to L.A. to interview a woman with a credible rape allegation against Harvey Weinstein, I was ordered to stop, not to interview this woman,” McHugh told The Times. “And to stand down on the story altogether.” Asked to respond, Oppenheim told The Times: “He was never told to stop in the way he’s implying," adding: “We repeatedly made clear to Ronan and Rich McHugh the standard for publication is we needed at least one credible on-the-record victim or witness of misconduct. And we never met that threshold while Ronan was reporting for us.” Oppenheim added that Weinstein had no influence on NBC News' reporting. McHugh decided to speak out after leaving NBC News two weeks ago. Asked why it took him so long to leave the network, McHugh said he wanted to continue to provide for his family and he feared NBC could retaliate against him. Asked to respond to McHugh's comments to The Times, Farrow said in a statement: "Rich is a fantastic producer and journalist. He’s a person of integrity, and he cared deeply about the investigative stories we worked on together and the importance of seeing them through.” UPDATE: NBC News says any assertion that it tried to kill the Weinstein story is "an outright lie."