In just 7 months’ time Ronan Farrow has emerged as one of the most influential and consequential figures in media.
He won the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his deep-dive investigations into sexual misconduct; his book, War On Peace, remains on the New York Times Best-Sellers list; and he’s starting to build out a team for his new HBO show, part of a a three-year deal he signed earlier this year.
“One of the lessons of this past year is, sometimes the right choice is turning down the glossier option of more screen time and real estate in favor of getting the story as completely, precisely correct as possible,” Farrow told us earlier this week. “I think that same principle will guide me, broadly speaking, and I’m gravitating toward less frequent, and bigger, deeper storytelling.”
Just today we’re seeing an aftereffect of Farrow’s investigation into sexual harassment claims against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, as Weinstein turned himself in to New York City police.
Farrow backed into TV news in 2013, when he got a call from MSNBC president Phil Griffin. His rocky relationship with NBC News ended last year. Farrow will have more to say on that, too.
TVNewser: On the book front – you have War on Peace out right now, and then there’s Catch and Kill, which focuses more on your deep investigations into sexual misconduct. I also know you bring up the NBC News saga. How far will you go?
Farrow: I think that there’s a lot to be said about the systems that kept the Harvey Weinstein story, and other stories about the abuse of power, quiet for as long as they were quiet. I have been saying from the very beginning in response to questions about some of those systems that I wanted to be very careful to keep the focus on the women coming forward, and their allegations. I didn’t want to run the risk of overshadowing that with the story behind the story. But people are right to ask the questions. I have a body of evidence that I think tells a story that is right to tell, and that book will be the right time and place for it.
TVNewser: Talk about your work back and forth from TV, with your new HBO show, to your print work for The New Yorker.
Farrow: HBO has been incredible about giving us a lot of space creatively and saying, ‘What do you want to do and how regularly do you want to do it?'” I’m excited to be building out my team right now to continue to do exactly the kind of TV investigative journalism I’ve been doing for several years. I think when you talk about stories that speak truth to power, and take a fair amount of legwork, and give people – hopefully, if I’m doing my job right – deeper insights into problems that are too often in the shadows, those tend to be stories that are really powerfully served by both print and television. My trajectory has been to try to find a larger and more independent platform to do that, and I think I have found that with this HBO property we’re developing.
TVNewser: Would you ever make a return to cable news? Is that something that has ever crossed your mind?
Farrow: If I can be in a place where I am telling stories that matter, and would elevate voices that need elevating, and really arm people with new and important facts about how their country works, then I’ll let that guide me. I’m open to whatever platform best allows me to test those goals. There are people who do work that meet that threshold in network, in cable, in the documentary space. There are different ways to crack that nut. Obviously I have done several of them and I imagine I’ll continue to move between several different ways of approaching those problems.
With the Today Show investigative series, and really going back to when I was using the MSNBC show, absurdly in the middle of the day, to air 17-minute packages on topics like over-prescription at VA hospitals – I always felt that there was a need for more of these stories to be told. When I see someone who shares that sensibility, I just want to stand up and cheer. When I first started digging into those kinds of stories, I had a lot of quizzical looks from executives who didn’t really get the point of it. Especially on the TV side of the equation, it was almost viewed as something that was a novelty. I’m so grateful–and I can’t take credit for this, it’s really about a whole group of reporters who have done such great work over the past year–and I’m really happy to see a resurgence of investigative reporting, and people really understanding why it can be so important if you do it right.