Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

by Ronan Farrow

The night after the Times story ran, CBS News and ABC News prominently covered the deepening scandal on their evening programs. Both networks did so again the following morning, airing detailed segments with original interviews. Only NBC didn’t mention the news that first evening, and only NBC offered no original reporting the next morning. Instead, Craig Melvin, filling in for Lauer, read a script that ran less than a minute and was dominated by Weinstein’s rebuttals to the allegations. That weekend, the pattern repeated: Saturday Night Live, which had eagerly riffed on similar stories about Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump, didn’t mention Weinstein once.

The relationship between AMI and Trump was an extreme example of the media’s potential to slip from independent oversight to cocktail party alliances with reporting subjects. But, for AMI, it was also familiar territory. Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said. One after another, the AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it. It was an old term in the tabloid industry: “catch and kill.”