One of the most chilling elements of the Harvey Weinstein scandal boiled down to two simple words.
“They knew.”
Weinstein’s predatory behavior was an open secret among celebrity circles. It wasn’t just them, though.
The producer’s victims had plenty of reasons to remain silent, from fear of career repercussions to emotional distress.
Why did some reporters do the same?
NBC famously spiked a story that could have ended Weinstein’s reign earlier than his 2017 downfall.
Veteran journalist Kim Masters suggested, following Weinstein’s downfall, that she had the goods on him more than 20 years ago when she confronted the producer with this devastating line:
“I heard you rape women.” Weinstein didn’t deny it, she recalled.
It isn’t the only example of journalists knowing plenty but keeping information to themselves.
The following cases chart a similar path, with a major figure behaving badly, but the journalists assigned to cover him failing to tell us the full story. The details eventually came out, but by then others had been hurt, needlessly, by these men.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo
Conservatives have been screaming from the roof tops that the New York governor behaved very badly at the dawn of the pandemic. News outlets like The Daily Caller reported how the high-profile Democrat shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a COVID-19 hero.
Cuomo issued an executive order on March 25 ordering nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept patients from hospitals who had tested positive for the coronavirus. While he rescinded the policy on May 11, more than 6,400 nursing home patients have died since the pandemic began after having been sent back to their care facility. More than 20,000 nursing home staffers were infected in March and April, according to the Associated Press.
Conservatives railed against the Governor for month, after month, knowing his early pandemic decision to flood nursing homes with infected patients likely doomed thousands of elderly New Yorkers.
Politicians couldn’t be expected to nail every aspect of a once in a generation pandemic, but the hero worship lavished on Cuomo didn’t mesh with reality.
All the while, Hollywood fawned over him. Howard Stern treated him like royalty and the press whispered how Cuomo could be summoned should Joe Biden falter in the presidential race.
It gets worse, though.
In recent weeks we’ve learned not just about Cuomo’s alleged sexual abuses but how he and his team bullied the press over the years.
“‘You have a vendetta against him don’t you!’ That was the last time I allowed someone connected to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration to harass and manipulate me,” former News10 reporter Lindsay Nielsen wrote in a statement on Sunday. “It was during one of the many accusatory and threatening phone calls I received by his staff members that I realized this behavior was never going to stop. It was shortly thereafter that I decided to leave my job at News10.”
How many other reporters were treated in a similar fashion? Will they eventually share their stories, too?
Is there any chance local reporters had a good idea what was going on behind the scenes … and said nothing? If the average conservative knew the score, how could journalists miss it?
Alec Baldwin
The combustible “30 Rock” alum has had more brushes with controversy, and the law, than most of his peers not named Sheen. He’s feuded with shutterbugs, reporters and even flight attendants over the years.
There’s another part of the Baldwin story, though, that deserves attention. The progressive star has been bullying female journalists over the years, even though they’ve mostly stayed silent about it.
Mostly.
In 2018 a trio of well-known journalists shared their experiences with the “Saturday Night Live” alum on social media after Baldwin’s arrest over a parking spot dispute.
ABC White House correspondent Tara Palmeri said the star told her, “I hope you choke to death” when he saw her staking out his home.
New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman said Baldwin blocked her on Twitter, but not before sending “hundreds of thousands of followers to berate me for…writing about a fundraiser he’d hosted in a way he didn’t find satisfactory,” she said.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said the actor called her a “hag” after her report revealed he used multiple nannies.
Those revelations, though, never led to Baldwin’s cancellation or even a full-throated reply from groups like Time’s Up or NOW. Chances are if he trips up, again, these recollections could come back to haunt him.
Or not. Baldwin’s fiercely liberal posture may continue to protect him … from himself.
Jeffrey Epstein
We all know the late financier’s hideous crimes involving underage girls. That wasn’t publicly known for many years, partially thanks to a network’s decision not to air a damning story about his alleged behavior.
And we have a leaked “hot mic” moment to thank for the revelation.
The tape in question, released by James O’Keefe of Project Veritas fame, features ABC News anchor Amy Robach saying her bosses spiked a story that would have revealed Epstein’s crimes several years before the law finally caught up with him.
“I’ve had the story for three years… we would not put it on the air,” Robach said on the hot mic. “It was unbelievable what we had, Clinton, we had everything.”
She kept talking.
“Um, first of all, I was told, who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story,” Robach said on the video recording. “Then, the Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that we, that also quashed the story.”
“I tried for three years to get it on to no avail. And now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations and I freaking had all of it,” Robach said. “I’m so pissed right now.”
ABC claimed the report in question wasn’t reliable enough to share. Could Robach, or any of the other journalists she worked on for the story, keep digging until that wasn’t the case, taking ABC at its word? Perhaps they could have turned to other networks or colleagues to keep the story alive?
Epstein wasn’t an openly partisan figure. He spent more time concocting his criminal operation than making political statements. Still, he donated heavily to Democrats over the years and palled around with former President Bill Clinton, a connection that could have damaged the ex-leader’s name, at the very least.
In journalism’s defense, bringing the hammer down on powerful men comes with consequences. Bullying. Intimidation. Possible lawsuits. It must be done with great care, with every fact double and triple checked.
Would any of that stop a journalist from publishing a damning story about, say, President Donald Trump? Sen. Ted Cruz? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?
That answer may say it all.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.