The Downside of Celebrating the Great Journalism about Harvey Weinstein

It’s easy to be enamored by great journalism. I’m one to stand up when the press is denigrated, shouting, perhaps quixotically, into a Twitter-mediated void that I believe we’re at “peak journalism” — the best we’ve ever had. Through the listicles and native ads and millennial bashing and clickbait, our best journalism is better than that of any era, any generation. Sheer volume, rapidity, and instantaneousness pose unique challenges that we’re, as an industry and a craft, grappling with.

And the Harvey Weinstein reporting, these past few weeks, has been brilliant. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the New York Times and Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker showed the best we offer as a profession. In a one-two punch, the two most prestigious New York outlets shone bright, with deep reporting, incisive writing, and a yearning for truth that only emerges in true journalists. But, I couldn’t get excited about their success. All I could think about were the decades of missed opportunity.

It’s a tough story. In recent days, reports of those who almost had it breathed fire like societal acid reflux. Even the late great David Carr, our patron saint of media criticism, couldn’t quite get it nailed down in his feature for New York.

I think about Ailes and O’Reilly last year.

I imagine the outrage and sorrow after the Boston Globe uncovered the serial sexual abuse of children by priests in the Catholic Church. I imagine it must have been a similar kind of remorse. “How did we miss the story? How did everyone miss the story? There were so many people involved. There were so many people complicit.”

Certainly, here, I’ve been thinking a lot about many of these questions. There are so many Hollywood publications — not all are sycophantic. Many are derisive and report with grit and fervor. I wonder about The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. I wonder about the Los Angeles Times. Hell, I even wonder about the incomparably unethical TMZ, which nabs hefty scoops because it pays sources.

We should think hard and fast about why two New York outlets got the story that decades of close Hollywood reporting missed.

And if Farrow’s allegations of indifference at NBC are true, they too have been as complicit as anyone.

We should think about the benefit of the doubt, who deserves it and who does not.

Harvey Weinstein never deserved the benefit of the doubt. And yet he got it and so much more.

I celebrate great journalism, and in my way I am doing so here. Because the only way to get more Kantors, Twoheys, Farrows, and story-chasing Carrs is to think about the thousands of journalists who may have sniffed something sour and brushed it off.

I would only pray that if I smelled something that reeked a little too pungent, I’d have the chutzpah to look around the corner, dig underground, and see what I found on the other side.