WSWS Topic: "Ronan Farrow promotes #MeToo witch hunt in University of Michigan talk" by Oscar Gray
26 March 2019
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as part of its “Wallace House Presents” speaker series, hosted an event on March 19 titled “The Weinstein Effect: Breaking the Stories That Spurred a Movement.”
The event consisted of a conversation between Ken Auletta, a writer on various media issues, and Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker contributing writer whose October 2017 article about Harvey Weinstein helped touch off the #MeToo campaign.
The two-hour event was dominated by self-promotion and self-congratulation, identity politics and contempt for basic democratic rights. In their meandering comments, which were distinctly deficient in terms of facts and details, the two speakers took for granted that Farrow’s mix of hearsay, unproven allegations and anonymous comments constituted “evidence” of wrongdoing.
The event underscored the fact that #MeToo is a political campaign alien from—and hostile to—the interests of the working class, both women and men.
Farrow, a former State Department propagandist who worked for diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton, has experienced a career surge since penning the initial New Yorker article about Weinstein, as well as subsequent articles, including one that eventually led to the resignation of Les Moonves, CEO of the CBS Corporation.
HBO has brought Farrow on to produce a series of documentaries on “the abuse of power by individuals and institutions” for the cable and satellite television network. He has also signed a deal with Little, Brown and Company for a book about the Weinstein investigation.
In 2018, Farrow received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the Weinstein reporting, along with the New York Times, which won for articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. The Times and the Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting the same year for the war-mongering (and now discredited) coverage of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Meanwhile, the #MeToo campaign has been used to target, smear and destroy the careers of dozens of artists and public figures, all while undermining core democratic principles, including due process. The campaign is pursued relentlessly in the media and political establishment, particularly the Democratic Party, as part of a campaign to erode democratic rights, direct social anger along reactionary lines and open up new pathways to power for privileged layers of the upper middle class.
The March 19 audience, which filled roughly two-thirds of the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium, largely consisted of older attendees and faculty members. Despite the endless promotion of #MeToo on college campuses, the event did not capture the attention of large numbers of young people.
The occasion for the event was the Wallace House’s decision to award Farrow a Livingston Award for Young Journalists, described on the organization’s website as “honor[ing] journalists under the age of 35 for outstanding achievement in local, national and international reporting across all forms of journalism.”
Farrow was introduced as a “groundbreaking” reporter whose work set “the gold standard of sexual misconduct reporting” and set off “a tidal wave of societal change.” His reporting, it was claimed, “unveiled the tools at the disposal of America’s most powerful figures as they seek to silence their many victims.”
Farrow and Auletta presented a narrative of Farrow’s reporting that depicted him as an “investigative journalist” who was combating “power structures and power imbalances” while “aggressively searching for the truth.”
This is fraudulent. Farrow’s work is not in the tradition of genuine investigative journalism, associated with the efforts of those such as Seymour Hersh and Robert Parry, which seeks to expose crimes committed by powerful economic and political forces against the interests of broad layers of the population. In fact, sex scandals have a right-wing pedigree, as they have often been used to poison the social atmosphere and scapegoat oppressed populations (African Americans in the southern US, Jews in Germany under the Nazis, Muslims in Europe today, etc.).
Farrow’s sheet-sniffing “exposures” are little more than smear campaigns replete with unverifiable claims and salacious details appealing to readers’ basest instincts.
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