Catch and Kill

Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

By Ronan Farrow

But Griffin did become passionate when a business interest was on the line. Once, while I was co-hosting a charity concert called the Global Citizen Festival – a big, earnest, low – rent Live Aid – I interviewed the concert’s headline act, No Doubt. One of the festival’s goals that year was promoting vaccination, even as the anti-vaxxer movement in the United States was producing adherents and measles outbreaks. I asked Gwen Stefani if she vaccinated her kids, and how she felt about the anti-vaxxers. She said she supported vaccines and advised people to talk to their doctors. Mike Wallace at your door this was not. But back at Rockefeller Plaza , assembling the spot in edit, I got a call from an MSNBC producer working on the concert.

“Stefani’s people have reviewed the transcript, and they’d like some edits,” she said.

“Who sent them a transcript?”

“I – I don’t know.”

In my in – box was a redlined script , with Stefani’s sound bites rearranged and trimmed to make it sound like she was ambivalent to negative on the vaccine front. I told the producer I wouldn’t air it.

Pretty soon I was in Griffin’s office with him and another member of his team. “What the fuck?” he asked, exasperated.

I looked at the proposed script in front of me.

“Phil, I’m not gonna edit sound bites to change their meaning.”

“Why not?!” he said, like this was the craziest thing he’d ever heard.

“It’s not ethical?” I offered, less as a statement and more as a kind of reminder, hoping Griffin’s question had been rhetorical and he’d finish the thought. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and directed a “Lord give me strength” look at his colleague.

She tried a gentler tone. “We all know you care a lot about the fact that she hesitated here, seeming to genuinely struggle to find a nice way she put it— “journalism with a capital J, but this is not some sensitive political story.”

“It’s a puff piece!” Griffin chimed in. “Come on. What the fuck?”

“There are literally kids dying over this issue. She’s a famous person. Since when do we send transcripts of interviews outside the building anyway?”

“We don’t know how that happened-” his colleague began.

“Who cares?” Griffin interjected, impatient. “You know what happens if we don’t make these edits? Stefani’s threatening to pull out! That’s straight from her manager.”

“That’s who made these edits?”

Griffin blew past the question. “Point is, she pulls out, sponsors start to pull out, the network’s pissed …” The channel’s partnership with the Global Citizen Festival was, Griffin often remarked, bait to entice corporate sponsors. For weeks, we would run branded segments about Unilever or Caterpillar.

“So let’s not air it,” I said.

“You have to air it,” said Griffin.

“Why?”

“It’s part of the deal with the sponsors, with her people— “

“We ran this all the way up,” his colleague said, referring to the executive chain of command in the news group. “Your concerns are not shared.”

Griffin said he’d tell me what he told another anchor trying to air a tough segment about net neutrality – the principle that internet providers shouldn’t charge different rates for different types of data on the internet, which our parent company was lobbying against. “You wanna work for PBS and have complete freedom and make a hundred thousand bucks a year , be my guest,” he recalled telling that anchor.” You wanna fight with me on what’s good for the bottom line, I’ll be happy to put your salary numbers out in the press.”

I considered quitting. I called Tom Brokaw, who said I under no circumstances could air sound bites with deceptive edits, and gave me the same warning about fucking my credibility that he’d later lay on me during the Weinstein reporting. Then I called Savannah Guthrie, who had a knack for cutting through bullshit. “What about just not airing that part of the interview?” she suggested.

“I mean, it was most of the interview,” I said.

“Just find something else to air.”

It was simple and, in hindsight, obvious advice – don’t air the deceptive part, but don’t self-immolate over a singer’s backstage interview. Picking the right fights was a lesson I could be slow to learn. In the end, I sat at the anchor desk and aired a five-minute clip of small talk with No Doubt. I felt neither hella good nor hella bad.

(Farrow 2019, 176-178)

All of the AMI employees I spoke with said that the alliance with Trump had distorted the place and its business model. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval,” said Jerry George, the former AMI senior editor. Several of the employees told me that Pecker had reaped tangible benefits. They said that people close to Trump had introduced Pecker to potential sources of funding for AMI. In the summer of 2017, Pecker visited the Oval Office and dined at the White House with a French businessman known for brokering deals with Saudi Arabia. Two months later, the businessman and Pecker met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Some of the employees felt that the most significant reward was AMI’s steadily accumulating blackmail power over Trump. Howard bragged to friends that he was turning down television job offers because he felt his current position , and his ability to hold negative stories over people, gave him more power than any career in traditional journalism. “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship,” Maxine Page , the AMI veteran, told me,” but in fact Pecker has the power – he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried. “The concern had run through the conversations with McDougal , too.” Someone in a high position that controls our country , if they can influence him,” she said of Trump, “it’s a big deal.”

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.”