Name: Ronan Farrow, Ben Smith, and the problem of the superstar journalist
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Ronan Farrow, Ben Smith, and the problem of the superstar journalist

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The voice of journalismMay 19, 2020“Is Ronan Farrow too good to be true?” With that question—which, let’s be honest, we’ve all thought at one point or another—Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist, made the case that the answer is “yes,” and launched a New York media spat for the ages. , Smith allowed that he’d long “marveled” over Farrow’s ability “to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time,” but that “some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.” He then proceeded to comb through Farrow’s back catalogue at the New Yorker, as well as his recent book, Catch and Kill, and subject various explosive claims therein—about the jailed former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, the movie mogul and Harvey Weinstein, and NBC News, —to vigorous vetting. Farrow, Smith concludes, is “not a fabulist”; rather, “he delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic… and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic.” At times, Smith argues, Farrow “suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.”Twitter exploded. (No, you’ve stayed indoors too long!) Some journalists lauded Smith’s column. “may[be] the most important media column I’ve ever read”; Jonathan Martin, , urged “every reporter—and aspiring reporter” to read it. more qualified in their praise; Erik Wemple, a media writer at the Washington Post, but noted, too, that the column “falls short of excusing NBC News’s fumbling of Farrow’s Weinstein reporting.” , , charging, variously, , , and that Smith himself is not one to talk, given his track record. Prior to joining the Times this year, Smith was editor in chief at BuzzFeed News, (yes, the pee-tape one) and . (John Carreyrou, scourge of Theranos, ; BuzzFeed had been clear that it didn’t know if the dossier was reliable.) Almost every opinion that one could tweet about the column was tweeted by someone. “You can take a bro out of Buzzfeed,” the investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr , “but can you ever take Buzzfeed out of the bro?” . .ICYMI:Some of the tweets were more consequential than others. , Michael Luo, a top editor at the New Yorker, said Smith had done “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 added that the New Yorker had provided Smith with “detailed responses” that Smith did not include. “We take corrections seriously and would be happy to correct something if it were shown to be wrong,” Luo tweeted. “But Ben has not done that here.” Later, ; jumping off of Luo’s thread, he said Smith had misinterpreted the central thrust of Catch and Kill, and that he stood by his reporting. Rich McHugh, who worked with Farrow on his Weinstein story at NBC, that the network “personally ordered” him to stop reporting, and called Farrow a “completely fair and meticulous reporter.” McHugh said he, too, had offered a comment that Smith left out.I won’t dwell further on the weeds here—because Smith’s claims, and the rebuttals to them, are so detailed that litigating them all would require its own Smith-length analysis, but also because the weeds don’t reveal much about the central flaw in the column. To justify his nitpicking, Smith not only asserts that details matter, but that Farrow’s alleged carelessness is a pernicious example of a wider problem: “resistance journalism,” or the idea that too often, in the age of Trump, “the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness” have been jettisoned when they’ve impeded “damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices.” Farrow, Smith continues, “told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works.”Details, of course, matter enormously. But “resistance journalism,” here, is an ill-defined cliché. As the journalist Emily Birnbaum , many targets of Farrow’s work—Matt Lauer, the Democratic attorney general of New York, the head of CBS—are hardly the “public figures most disliked by the loudest voices.” (Before Farrow—and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, of the Times—came along, nor was Weinstein.) And one observer’s “resistance journalism” is another’s timely, aggressive probing of powerful interests that demand to be probed. (“Ronan Farrow should dot his i’s and cross his t’s…well done, Ben,” the media columnist Will Bunch . “But let’s not allow a story like this distract us from the fearless, risk-taking take-no-prisoners journalism we need in 2020. If ‘resistance journalism’ exists, then let’s have more of it, not less.”) Even if you accept Smith’s nitpicking as fair, all he has proven is shoddy reporting—a timeless problem that doesn’t, in itself, support the broader, Trump-era charge.The irony here is that Smith didn’t need to frame his column around Trump to make it more than just a fact-checking dossier. The problem Smith identifies isn’t “resistance journalism,” but rather “superstar journalism”—the notion that some reporters, Farrow definitely among them, enjoy such glowing reputations that their output can’t possibly always match up. The superstar journalist may well be extremely talented, but that doesn’t make them an infallible prodigy—everyone has biases, and everyone makes mistakes. The cult of journalistic celebrity tends to ignore context—in Farrow’s case, the editorial and social capital to which he has access—and the crucial fact that high-level journalism is a team sport. That’s not to say that journalists can’t have personalities (, that they should be allowed to); it’s to remember that the quality and truthfulness of the work are always the most important thing, no matter who produced it. , “Journalism is not an identity. Journalism is an action. It is something you do.” (Nolan was writing in the context of right-wing operatives scouring reporters’ social-media accounts for dodgy old posts, but his analysis also applies well to this situation.) Farrow’s work has often been outstanding. To the extent that it isn’t, it invites scrutiny. As readers, it’s on us to bring a skeptical eye, not a fawning one.In fairness to Smith, his column shines a light on this problem, even if he misdiagnoses it; in fairness to Farrow, his superstar status is not his fault (at least not entirely). The way the pair’s “beef” was received on Twitter—which is the fault of neither man—merely drove home our problems of perception.To answer Smith’s question: Yes, Ronan Farrow, the superstar journalist, is too good to be true. How could he not be? That insight alone isn’t enough to damn Farrow; you can read into the weeds yourself to decide if Smith prosecuted his case successfully. But it might be enough to damn us.Below, more on Smith and Farrow:Other notable stories:ICYMI:Update: The bullet point on SmileDirectClub’s lawsuit against NBC News has been updated to include a rebuttal from NBC News.Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by .Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter .Ten days ago, a public-records request came to light involving the Columbia Missourian, a newspaper that is affiliated with the University of Missouri and staffed by students in its journalism school, and Eric Schmitt, the state’s attorney general and Trump-endorsed...

The voice of journalismMay 19, 2020“Is Ronan Farrow too good to be true?” With that question—which, let’s be honest, we’ve all thought at one point or another—Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist, made the case that the answer is “yes,” and launched a New York media spat for the ages. , Smith allowed that he’d long “marveled” over Farrow’s ability “to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time,” but that “some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.” He then proceeded to comb through Farrow’s back...

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Ronan Farrow, Ben Smith, and the problem of the superstar journalist

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