Harvey Weinstein Compromised the Media, Which Became Complicit in His Career of Harassing Women

I missed this -- New York Magazine, a source says, had the Weinstein story last year, but was intimidated out of publishing it.

New York magazine had the Harvey Weinstein story - -or nearly had it -- a year ago but didn’t run anything after the movie mogul and his team of lawyers and p.r. consultants intervened.

Reporter Ben Wallace spent months interviewing dozens of people in Weinstein’s world in the hope of exposing Weinstein’s history of sexual aggression toward young women.

“New York magazine had the story a year ago, and Harvey had it killed,” one source told me.

“Harvey was sweating bullets. He sat down with Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss, and they were still going ahead. Then, it suddenly went away. The reporter must be kicking himself now.”

Wallace declined to speak to me.

New York magazine denies this claim. To be fair, Richard Johnson's claim that they either had it or "nearly had it" does seem to leave a lot of wiggle room.

On the other hand, the New York Times and the New Yorker are now on this story, the NYT having published, the New Yorker gearing up to do so. It seems like a fair speculation that Ben Wallace's discoveries made their way to those two publications and resulted in the stories published.

So maybe New York did actually "nearly" have it, with just another round of pumping sources to nail it.

Lee Smith writes about the media's complicity in all of this.

A friend reminds me that there was a period when Miramax bought the rights to every big story published in magazines throughout the city. Why mess with Weinstein when that big new female star you’re trying to wrangle for the June cover is headlining a Miramax release? Do you think that glossy magazine editor who threw the swankiest Oscar party in Hollywood was trying to "nail down" the Weinstein story? Right, just like the hundreds of journalists who were ferried across the river for the big party at the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the premiere of Talk--they were all there sipping champagne and sniffing coke with models in order to "nail down" the story about how their host was a rapist.

That’s why the story about Harvey Weinstein finally broke now. It’s because the media industry that once protected him has collapsed. The magazines that used to publish the stories Miramax optioned can’t afford to pay for the kind of reporting and storytelling that translates into screenplays. They’re broke because Facebook and Google have swallowed all the digital advertising money that was supposed to save the press as print advertising continued to tank.

But there's another reason Smith says the story didn't break previously: The leftist media as a whole was dedicated to protecting Bill Clinton, and any story about Harvey Weinstein's history of harassment would of course shine an unwelcome light on Clinton's similar history.

Only now that the Clinton family is no longer any kind of political force can the left report on Weinstein:

Which brings us, finally, to the other reason the Weinstein story came out now: Because the court over which Bill Clinton once presided, a court in which Weinstein was one part jester, one part exchequer, and one part executioner, no longer exists.

A thought experiment: Would the Weinstein story have been published if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency? No, and not because he is a big Democratic fundraiser. It’s because if the story was published during the course of a Hillary Clinton presidency, it wouldn’t have really been about Harvey Weinstein. Harvey would have been seen as a proxy for the president's husband and it would have embarrassed the president, the first female president.

More On That: Hey Left Wing, Where Are Your Pussyhats Now?Via Hot Air, a three-alarm firecracker of a column comparing Hollywood's freakout over Trump's Billy Bush comments to their chastened silence about their good pal Harvey Weinstein.

posted by Ace at 05:07 PM

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