In the navel-gazing nation of journalism, it was the shot heard round the world: “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?” That was the headline of Ben Smith’s latest for the New York Times, which landed with a bang on Sunday night and quickly set Twitter ablaze. The more than 3,500-word column was an assiduous accounting of various bombshells Farrow has reported for The New Yorker, including his groundbreaking work on Harvey Weinstein. It was as if Farrow had his very own public editor, and while Smith conceded that the 32-year-old investigative reporter “is not a fabulist… he does not make things up,” it was a brutal portrayal nonetheless.
In Smith’s words: “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.” New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick, meanwhile, gave a full-throated defense of Farrow’s reporting: “Working alongside fact-checkers, lawyers, and other editorial staff members at The New Yorker, he achieved something remarkable, not least because he earned the trust of his sources, many of whom had to relive traumatic events when they talked to him. We stand by Ronan Farrow’s reporting. We’re proud to publish him.”
Smith has been the Times’ media columnist for more than two months now, following in the footsteps of Jim Rutenberg and David Carr. He’s a bomb-thrower, not exactly a normal Timesian role, and his columns have made waves one way or another. There was Smith’s inaugural installment that questioned whether his new employer’s runaway success was good for journalism; a searing postmortem of Fox News’s early coronavirus coverage; a contrarian Tara Reade take that turned out to be arguably a bit premature; and even an unflattering assessment of the state of Condé Nast, which owns Vanity Fair. (Condé Nast also owns The New Yorker, which is where my wife works; conflicts all around!) But Smith’s Farrow column has been the biggest talker of them all, and perhaps the most polarizing too.
The voluminous reactions on Twitter appear to be split between people applauding Smith for doing the uncomfortable but necessary work of holding an influential and highly regarded peer to account (“Super-deep accountability journalism by @benyt on Ronan Farrow’s written record. Muscular debunking,” tweeted Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple), and those who detect whiffs of grudge-settling and hypocrisy (or who at least think Smith failed to deliver a kill shot befitting the length and aggressiveness of his examination). To quote one person in the latter camp, John Carreyrou, the former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who took down Elizabeth Holmes: “Journalistic high-mindedness from @benyt, the guy who pubbed the Trump dossier without fact-checking a shred of it and who later refused to retract the Trump-instructed-Cohen-to-lie-to-Congress story. Rich with irony and quite brazen.”
I checked in with both Smith and Farrow, and neither had anything to add. (Nor did the Times or The New Yorker.) But there are undeniably rich dynamics to the whole episode, in which a relative Times outsider has targeted one of journalism’s sacred cows, and, in so doing, created a sort of institutional face-off between two of the industry’s most venerable news organizations. The Times and The New Yorker compete robustly with one another—as they did on the Weinstein story, which the Times broke first—but they would typically be seen more as allies than antagonists. Adding to the complexity is the fact that they shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 over some of the same #MeToo reporting by Farrow in The New Yorker that Smith is now prosecuting in the Times. If nothing else, it’s rather fascinating to watch. As Politico’s Jack Shafer put it: “There is something wonderfully cleansing about a full-bore @nytimes vs. @NewYorker fight.”