Phil Griffin on Ronan Farrow: ‘Within 20 Minutes I Wanted to Hire Him’

By Merrill Knox 

RonanFarrowThe New York Times Magazine has a long profile on “reluctant TV star” Ronan Farrow, who will debut his new MSNBC show this year. Farrow, who went to college at 11 and Yale Law School at 18, grabbed the attention of MSNBC president Phil Griffin on Twitter:

Last summer, when he got the call from MSNBC, Farrow was living in a charmingly musty dorm room at Magdalen College, Oxford, England. He had left a job at the State Department for a Rhodes scholarship, studying politics and international relations. Farrow assumed MSNBC wanted him to make appearances as a talking head on their shows. He had written articles decrying what he saw as the American government’s obsession with secrecy and the partisan tenor of the Congressional hearings on Benghazi and had been invited to talk about them on television. But Phil Griffin, the president of the network, had other ideas. He’d seen clips of Farrow giving interviews and speeches and was impressed. “I started following him on Twitter,” he told me recently, “and loved the way he talked about things.” When Farrow was in New York, the two sat down for a chat. “Within 20 minutes I wanted to hire him,” Griffin says. “He’s got it.”

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