MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Credits Ronan Farrow’s Reporting, Breaking With NBC News Executives

Ted Johnson

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MSNBC host Chris Hayes devoted a portion of his show on Monday to praising Ronan Farrow, breaking with NBC News executives who pushed back against Farrow’s reporting in his new book Catch and Kill.

“It’s the kind of journalism that you want to do as a journalist, that everyone who works in this business should want to facilitate,” Hayes said on his show, All in with Chris Hayes.

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Earlier in the day, NBC News President Noah Oppenheim sent out a memo to staff in which he vigorously denied some of Farrow’s claims, including Farrow’s assertion that executives knew about allegations against Matt Lauer before he was fired and didn’t do anything about it. He also pushed back against Farrow’s claim that the network withheld his investigative work on Harvey Weinstein under threat that Weinstein would find a way to go public with the Lauer story.

“One thing is indisputable,” Hayes said. “Ronan Farrow walked out of NBC News while working on the Weinstein story and, within two months, published an incredible article at The New Yorker that not only won a Pulitzer but helped trigger a massive social and cultural reckoning that continues to this day.”

Hayes said that “the insidious destructive force of the path of least resistance is everywhere you look. Heck, I feel the tug of it myself as my own news organization is embroiled in a very public controversy over its conduct.”

An NBC News spokesperson declined comment.

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