Ronan Farrow: Power, Media and Politics

ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for being here sorry for the slight delay ruinin Faro has been a little delayed at the airport but he is enroute so we're going to shuffle up the order a little bit and introduce a couple of other measures plan B first of all I am David Wamsley I am the chair of the Canadian journalism foundation and I'm also the editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and I extend a very warm welcome to all of you it's an absolute pleasure to be here this evening to have a sellout crowd to spend a moment pausing and thinking about what journalism actually means in the 21st century I think as an industry we often don't do a good enough job of telling our own story and tonight is a chance for us to make amends on that this evening would not be possible without the support of Accenture our generous sponsors who are with us thick and thin through various Jay talks that we hold throughout the year so thank you to them as we wait for rumen to wind his way through the Sunday traffic I thought what we would do instead is I would play moderator and introduce you to someone who probably needs no introduction at all but I'll give it a go when I was appointed editor of The Globe and Mail there was one name that I wanted to come to join us and that was because it was a reporter who had a commitment and a determination to get this story no matter how sensitive or how difficult it was it happened to be at that time the mayor of Toronto and she was working for the Toronto Star and Robin Doolittle was someone who had made it meteoric ly clear that the only thing that she wanted to do was the journalism of the highest quality with the best talent being used in the best way so when I hired her into the Globe and Mail four years ago her reticence included the fact that she didn't really know what this idea of a nebulous national story would be what would it actually mean how would it differ from where she'd already been a great success at the star and I said trust me I want you to do journalism that is memorable and I want you to take your time and so what she did was she honed I suppose the Holy Trinity of modern journalism which is to create journalism based on data that data secondarily has to be then shared with the audience because the audience is an important part of the story and thirdly it had to be memorable and of course out of that came the seminal global investigation unfounded a look at tens of thousands of sex assault cases across Canada that the authorities had concluded had not resulted in a crime at all but simply had not taken place it was extraordinary work and for 2017 it was the most awarded journalism in the English language anywhere in the world so it gives me a very great pleasure to welcome on stage the reigning Canadian national journalist of the year Robin Doolittle [Applause] hello isn't it so nice to come to an audience and you're like we work at the globe but everyone's like yeah you're a journalist hooray don't look at your phone because it's a completely different I'm very well lovely to see you Love Lucy how are you guys doing good did everyone buy Ronan's book in the front yeah well he's not here he can't hear you say no so we're gonna spend a few minutes talking until Ronan gets here he is in the car so it shouldn't be shouldn't be too long very close like 10-15 minutes but it's Toronto traffic so we thought we should probably come out I know your time will not be cut short yeah they all good so Robin as you can tell we rehearse this the story of them find it obviously it was something that you spent 20 months on I think a lot of people in the audience will have a sense of that but let's look back at it for a moment let's think about some of those moments and the sense of why it captured the imagination not only because of the unimpeachable data you used but why did it then go on to become such a powerful engine and drive so much of the news you're a little bit out of it now you're yeah I think Sinclair Stewart our our deputy editor really summed it up best one day when we were discussing it after the fact the very beginning of unfounded the genesis of it was the Jian Ghomeshi trial and so junga messy story broke in October 2014 the following summer I was really looking for my next project David was giving me the big speech that you heard earlier that big national take your time which is just horrible words to hear when you've spent most of your career as a daily news reporter where you're writing three to five stories a week and so I was just trying to think of what to do here Jian Ghomeshi everyone's obsessed with Jian Ghomeshi and I was just like sick of hearing about Jian Ghomeshi and but it did get me thinking the prevailing thought at the time was the system is rigged against sexual assault victims and this certainly felt true but I had no idea if it was true and so we you know I thought about how to go about can you prove this from an investigative standpoint and I initially thought I was going to do the the justice system and I started looking into kind of the stats and realized there weren't stats and that the actual problem was at the gatekeepers to the justice system the court system was the police and that was the genesis someone founded and we ended up honing in on this one specific stat this unfounded stat an unfounded case is a case where the detective does not believe that the crime occurred that's different then there's not enough evidence to convict someone or we can't find the guy this is this is an invalid false baseless allegation and what I found was that 20% of cases on average were being dismissed in this way and that was really key to me because so often when you hear you know criticisms of the justice system what you hear from law enforcement is the real problem is that people aren't reporting and if more women and men would just report sexual assault this system would be better and what we found is that actually that was not the case and so getting back to Sinclair's comment that really summed it up perfectly the success of unfounded was that it honed in on this one very specific tangible thing trying to fix the justice system how can you ever wrap your head around that but if you focus on that one stat that then you can build a bigger investigation and anecdotal investigation and get into the specific stories the human stories so I think that's what really resonated with people but before you are able to have I think one of the problems we face is that we live in this professional paradox if you just take a newspaper forget for a moment digital a newspaper is delivered in 7-foot snowdrifts it's there at your home at 5:30 in the morning and it looks perfect or at least it should look pretty much smooth the front page we have for example tomorrow that we're just designing right now for the globe is an inside look in very remote province in China where our correspondent in Beijing Nathan Vander clip has gone and was tailed by seven different police operatives while he took photographs and is reporting as only the second person in the world on the mass reeducation camps for the we Gers now that will look in the paper tomorrow and it's probably rolling online shortly as a kind of smooth peace but I always think of that as similarly as I do to something there's a deep investigation it doesn't just happen you have to commit to that sense of discovery so were you surprised after it all ran that people listen to you in authority those who had never provided the documentation suddenly were prepared to give you the numbers oh yeah it was so this is just standard practice whenever you do a big investigation you go to all the parties that are mentioned in the story particularly people who you know might not come out well if you make it look an allegation against them and you tell them exactly what you're gonna print any questions you have you give them an opportunity to respond I call them my due diligence emails and I sent it three months before the story ran every single police service a full rundown of my story like this is what this story is going to say at the beginning in the middle in the end this is what your Police Service this is what I'm saying about your Police Service because what we did with unfounded was we created a database that anyone in the country could go look up their address and see what their police service was doing for sexual assault is what your Police Service says unfounded rate is this is what it looks like in connection to the the broader country I asked I was trying to get a sense of what the landscape looks like with sexual violence and asked all these different police services what their staffing levels were like and none responded like very few look ten and then suddenly the story runs prime minister says we want action and within a week it was it was a totally different story it was shocking lovely all right I've got a signal from side stage so Robin if you stay there just a second normal program this is going right okay anyone need a stretch before we start you want to stand up Burt there was no there was nothing you said great okay so back to this evening [Applause] on behalf of the Canadian journalism foundation we honored Ronan Farrow in 2018 with a special citation for courageous reporting that fueled a global movement against sexual harassment he was recognized quite rightly for his New Yorker investigation exposing sexual harassment and assault allegations against the Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein and the complex web of people and systems that he used to cover up his acts in a competitive lockstep with the New York Times two groundbreaking pieces were published within a week of one another one by Ronan and the other by Jody counter and Megan tui of the New York Times the articles inspired a global social media movement the three of them both teams separately awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and the many victims of sexual assault and harassment have now come forth with allegations about the sexual misconduct of other powerful figures not only in entertainment but across different industries I'd like you to take just a second queued up a video please roll I don't think we have to speculate about Ronan's future run Ronan's present is spectacular enough I mean this is a guy who before at the age where I was learning to tie my shoes Ronnie was going off to college okay he's been you know college graduate as a teenager he used a Rhodes Scholar he worked for Richard Holbrooke at the State Department for years whoa by the way he went to Yale Law School he had a television show so the fact that he's achieving something at the age of 29 30 is thrilling to watch but it's not entirely a shock I've never seen a reporter work harder than Ronan Farrow did thank you what am I gonna put in this the truth the truth goes in the bowl I'm so honored to be here and in such good company on stage and I'm just immensely heartened every single time I go to another country and I see hard-working journalists trying banging their head against the walls to expose the truth we are in a time in which this profession is so embattled and there is so much authoritarian rhetoric directed against the pursuit of the truth and there's so much misdirection and brazen lying and there is so much physical threat directed at journalists in so many parts of the world a lot of what we may talk about today is just how tough it can get to break these investigative stories but that pales in comparison to the journalists I profiled in various books and articles I've written in Pakistan or in Belarus or in so many places every Russian journalist who has tried to expose the military-industrial complex there and died in the process every day I see these stories and so what this award represents and what reporters around the world are doing like Robin is part of the solution it's part of taking a stand against all that so I'm just honored to be in this company I'm honored to be here and thank you each and every one of you for caring and for supporting that work oh here so you got to see Pearson Airport yeah I did one of the interesting consequences of the Trump era is everyone there was telling me it's so much tighter now security was imagine they see your name and they're like you definitely need to be here I look like trouble I literally went through three rounds of screening just now that seems like a great use of resources they were all lovely I mean it is Canada people are very flattering did they bring you a Tim Horton's they that would have been two Canadians right but you know they were extremely polite and very apologetic as they went to doing a fine job of screaming yeah yeah and I think what we've concluded is I'm not a threat that's good right okay well Ronin it is such an honor to have you here I can say you know the journalism world in Canada is not huge I get asked to do a lot of these things a couple of dozen a year maybe I have never had my friends and family ask to come to something before are they here yeah they're like I swear all these families this Steve people in my life of here yes I I've noticed none of you have come to other things but I understand so anyway let's let's give these people what they're here for we'll try not to okay right heartily your family Harvey Weinstein what can you tell me about what you remember of the first time that you heard rumors that Harvey Weinstein was harming women well harming women is a very different matter than I think what many people equated Harvey Weinstein with which is sort of generally scurrilous behavior he had a legendary temper he certainly I think was associated with sort of transactional sex you know that there's a casting couch stuff and you know I had read stories about various actresses who made it onto magazine covers at a time when it seemed like it wasn't appropriate for their career and he was said to have pulled the strings so in a sense I had the same knowledge of Harvey Weinstein that anyone else who was peripherally aware of Hollywood in the States had and it honestly wasn't until I started the story that I saw something entirely different what was it that made you think this is worth reporting but do you remember that moment how did the investigation start well there's a moment in every story maybe you've experienced this yourself where you kind of have wrapped your arms around the facts completely and you can see the whole of it and the patterns connect in a way where you realize it's real and there was certainly a point probably last summer where that was the case there were too many people telling me too many overlapping things we're counting to similar fact patterns independently of each other with too much evidence and it became apparent that this was something really important and how do you go about taking on someone like Harvey Weinstein well in my case I had to get fire and move out of my home so I I don't know that I can provide much of a guidebook on that I you go for broke and I've talked a lot about how that looks sort of glamorous in retrospect when you have some sense that it's gonna pay off but at the time it's really just scary and I wish I could say it was purely born of nobility I think by the time I made that decision it was sort of too late to go back I had already burned all my bridges what can you I mean I think you give a commencement address where you talked about that and I just like that was like one of the moments when we all fell in love with Ronan Farrow I think because that commencement address was just like I want to put this on my fridge yes there I feel this can you if people haven't read it what you should read it but like that's that moment when you're working on this and it's like oh my god this what if this doesn't happen and yeah invested so much there was a moment a little over a year ago where I was going from a meeting with one source to a meeting with another and I was in a cab and the context for this was a book I had worked on for years and years had been dropped by the publisher I didn't know if I would ever have another job in television and had been told that I was terminated at my current job after I refused to stop reporting this story I was working on I was getting threatened I was getting physical death threats I had moved out of my home I was not sleeping a lot I was not eating a lot and I had just learned that the times had come in a couple months after me and started reporting this story which was heartening in a lot of ways because I wanted the truth to get out but also I had no idea what they had as it turns out they had very different stuff you know they reported sexual harassment allegations I ended up reporting the first sexual assault allegations but I had no idea that that was going to be the case and I really thought that there was a chance that I might just get scooped and no one would ever know I ever worked on it I remember being in this cab and just breaking down and like weeping openly it was very pathetic on the phone with my partner and he was like alright just calm down we're gonna talk about this but also you really have to tip that cab driver I told there's a death in the family okay so like when you're going in it like tell people accepting people are fascinated by that like how are you structuring your days investigating this story like what do you do to investigate claims that these sources were telling you so I think there's been a little bit of a paradigm shift in our profession in the last couple of years sexual assault cases are not suing generous because you get this in murder cases too but they're quite distinctive in that it's a it's a rare type of criminal activity where very often the only surviving eyewitnesses are the participants and you know so you have a person who's alleged to have committed a crime and you have a survivor of that crime and there was I think a long-standing assumption that you just couldn't report that beyond this place of he-said she-said or he-said he-said or whatever and I think that's for a long time in the legal system not been the case and my background is as an attorney so I was aware in the case law of ways that people proved these things or you know as close as we can get in a legal context to proving very often particularly with a serial offender you will have mutually reinforcing fact patterns where numerosity can help shed light on is there an mo here very often even if there is no one else in the room there's a category of people who see the alleged survivor immediately afterwards and witness the aftermath as it's happening you know here the the recitation of the fact pattern it while it's still emotional and fresh and that's not considered hearsay in American law you know that's not just a standard Oh someone got told afterwards that's that's prompt outcry is that the legal term so one of the things I was able to impress upon people as I reported the story was there are these ways you can prove it Harvey Weinstein also and this is I think typical of reporting these kinds of cases when it specifically relates to powerful people had a paper trail so you had settlement after settlement and as I was able to obtain a lot of that documentation it became apparent that you really could put together a body of evidence that was very persuasive yeah and using those settlements which usually have silenced people to your advantage well right exactly so while a settlement is certainly not legally proof of any kind of crime I think when you have a pattern of settlements and it's very apparent because some of them are sloppily written what they're referring to what they're trying to cover up you know if you have a for instance one of the contracts that we obtained it's a million dollar settlement that calls for the complete destruction of all of the possible evidence any recordings of a specific window of you know during X hours if anything was recorded you're obligated to destroy it you have to turn over your phone and all your social media accounts to this private investigation firm they're going to wipe all of your devices you know that suggests someone is probably trying to not disclose what happened during those hours on that day right this is not the kind of contract any of us normally signs so these aren't just generic NDA is in other word they were written in a way that you gave a lot of information and none of those pieces in and of themselves is dispositive but together they create something really powerful he talked about a shift in our profession relating to these these stories being reported at all but one other thing that I've seen a shift in our profession and heard you talk about this as well which is really interesting I think there used to be this kind of old idea around journalism and source relationships like I'm the journalist and you're the source and you're just gonna I mean totally in charge and I'm gonna take all your facts and it's mine and too bad I think you that your Twitter bio I'm gonna take all your back too bad yeah but I think especially when you're reporting on on something as horrible and raw as a sexual assault you you do develop relationships with your sources and it can be sometimes hard to keep that professional distance while also maintaining trust and and the integrity of the story I can imagine that that's something like that you dealt with a lot like how did you balance that yeah it's there was a funny moment I collaborated on two stories this past year with Jane Mayer who's one of our great living American investigative reporters who mostly had dealt with sort of financial journalism type sources national security sources over a very long career of incredible stories and it was very much new territory for her when we did this story about a very powerful Democrat Eric Schneiderman to deal with people who were so emotionally raw all the time and it can be very draining and I remember I'm in these conversations where she's like do you know how to deal with this you know because it can be all-consuming and and fair enough you know I have a tremendous amount of compassion for the fact that when someone does this extraordinary brave thing of deciding they want to talk about something and and do so in a way where it hits them against a very powerful person they're there nerves are shredded all the time they're often reliving the worst moment of a lifetime re experiencing trauma and what that can translate into is you know you're doing your reporting but also there's someone who almost wants like a therapeutic relationship you know they want to just talk they want to be heard and and that doesn't go away after a story either you know I periodically we'll hear from sources that you know I've worked with on a story a year ago or more and they'll just call and they'll be they'll just want to talk you know I had there was a there was a wonderful woman who was a source in the story I did about Les Moonves Phyllis golden godly she is 82 years old she is the most remarkable woman like still leaves it's such a vibrant diverse life you know goes to see music lives on her own has her friends but she'll like she'll call me every few days and just say yeah and just say like hi how's it going what's going on and I love hearing from her you know but I'll be in the middle of ten different things and I really I do always try to sit down and like give her the time because she gave me the time and she didn't have to and she'll just say I mean this is a lovely version of what you get because she's not in a bad place emotionally Medical just say one time she said I don't want to lose you which is a very moving thing for a reporter to hear but you're you're also right that you know there can be less in the aftermath like that but more when you're in the heat of a story an uncomfortable tension where I actually have to explain sometimes two sources I'm working with you know I am so grateful for what you're doing here but also this is going to feel adversarial sometimes I'm gonna be stress testing your claims I'm gonna be you know digging into every possible response that people could throw at you to try to impugn your credibility and that's not always going to feel like a friendship yeah I found that in my own reporting just that explaining of you like I am a journalist I'm not an activist I'm not gonna write I believe survivor yes in a story and and I'm doing you no favors by not rigorously investigating your claims I'm so happy to hear you say that because you know I have a lot of conversations like this that are not with fellow journalists and have been honored to sit on stage with some great activist people like tirana burke who created the me to hash tag and has done all this wonderful community organizing and is a fantastic human being and she kind of teases me that I'm such a stickler for I'm all constantly pointing out like I I don't subscribe to the believe all survivors or believe all women's school of thought I subscribe to a listen to all survivors listen to the facts listen to all women yeah yeah yeah absolutely I think the greatest justice that you can do to these kinds of claims and to difficult newsworthy claims in general not just about sexual violence is listen to them listen to them even if they come from the most marginalized corners of our community even if they're about hard truths that we haven't confronted for a long time and as you point out the the best sort of journalism you can do the best bolstering of these claims doesn't involve advocacy and how do you deal with that I mean yeah interesting you said that cuz I deal with the same thing where you and you get in these kind of pushing polls with with activists I found some of the biggest backlash to my series was from within the advocacy community which is just it's a really interesting dynamic what do you do when you explain to people I'm a journalist not an activist or are you know I'm not given that exact quote I really think it's an important distinction and I I find it very frustrating actually that certainly in the States and I see versions of this around the world I don't know if this is true in the Canadian context you all would know better there is a shrinking space for that kind of I won't even say down the middle because that implies some kind of a false equivalence but that kind of blinders on just the facts ma'am like you care about the truth and you don't really care about the impact other than being passionate about exposing the truth and people often just don't understand that in the current climate you know I will do a story about a powerful Democrat most of my stories have been about powerful Democrats and as much as people are skeptical of it that's not because they're Democrats you know and I get all the hate mail saying you know you're a trump plants and yeah it's one of those guys that I mentioned was in a big opponent of Trump's he was pursuing all these legal cases against Trump and then he was gone and people weren't happy with me then I do a story about a Republican and people you know there's the whole like Russian troll farm that spins up and I've got all these like Mogga hat-wearing kind of avatars that don't really seem like the real people they got like three followers and a bald eagle in their banner and people you want to hang out with it's sure my best friends yeah and they're like you know Diana Phi or get cancer lovely lovely people and I think that some of that really is like algorithmically generated fakery but but also there are people out there who really passionately believe that everything slots into this partisan warfare that it's all about that and everything gets thrown into this cauldron of mistrust and the environment I was talking about where the media is so attacked and embattled and people don't really understand that there is still this thing we're talking about of just pursuing the truth so people can make up their own minds about it I think they hear pursuing the truth they're like that's what we media party right do the Twitter trolls get to you yeah yeah they do I mean I basically just removed myself from it and have stopped looking because it's it's so dehumanizing every time that gets spun up against you it's weird as a journalist cuz you don't think of not yourself necessarily as a public figure yeah I don't know but like and then you're just eviscerate 'add constantly on social media and I yes and that's ya know I'm glad you said that it's uh it's really brutal and and really counterproductive because it is specifically designed to ward us off of stories that people don't like and I think it's gone from being just a side effect of certain platforms having a degree of anonymity like Twitter and a degree of brevity where it encourages that kind of dialogue where die in a fire really yeah right exactly that's all that Fitz and and it's not like even a facebook which has its own problems or an Instagram where it's more about who you are it's tied to your real identity you're showing yourself theoretically with most profiles you see Twitter is is deeply anonymized and really I think gives new life to the guy who would otherwise be just sort of slurring words at the corner of the bar at closing time right possibly in his mom's basement developing a fake private investigation firm to smear robert muller but at but it's now evolved into something that i think is still more dangerous which is a highly organized set of institutions that deploy the trolls and there is now a whole parallel universe for the right and for the left that isn't interacting beyond that it's just like they see the the flag and then there's a swarm of what you're describing some of it fake some of it very obviously not real people and some of it driven by these extremists who are gloating this all on yeah and i think this is interesting because we're in an area now of this the political like the politics and journalism and what side were on or what not in the attacks and i one thing that i thought was really interesting after your Brett Kavanaugh story the Deborah Ramirez this is the second Cavanaugh accuser story I we broke the first story about Christine Ford's allegation the letter and the contents of it and then we broke the first a story about Ramirez yeah and I'd love to hear about that how that came to be but I was also interested just on this politics side I saw some on the Left saying like okay sure this is probably true but you shouldn't have broken it because it undermines the focus on Blasi Ford as if it's kind of the your job to to keep a campaign of pressure on cattle and I mean you just have to ignore that I don't I didn't see a lot of commentary to that effect I saw a lot of right-wing commentaries saying you know this is all made up and Ford has no corroboration and Ramirez has no corroboration Ramirez especially an extraordinarily high degree of cooperation for this kind of sexual assault plan you tell us about like the beginning of because it was a ninja yeah yeah I mean we had heard I had heard specifically about Ford's claim going back to July and had talked to some people in her orbit and she was actively considering they the Ramirez and Ford had very different trajectories Ford was actively considering trying to get word out about her story in some way Ramirez asked for none of it you know it was a widely retold story in her class and so other people in her Yale class spun off all the stories about it and it and it landed on the hill and then it was being investigated I'm at which point it in arguably was a huge news story that we had to cover the Ford claim disappeared for a long time because an American Democrat that she went to basically covered it up I mean I think considered it I think there was probably a generational attitudinal difference there considered it to be not worthy of dialogue do you think that's what that's interesting I mean that's certainly what staffers on the hill said that the dialogue behind the see well we quote people to that effect it's been this first story about Ford that basically no one could figure out why this wasn't brought forward and there was sort of a canard that was offered by the Democrats of oh we were respecting her or not her anonymity but very clearly it would have been possible to respect her anonymity and also do something about it private or some questioning in private it send it to the FBI none of that happened until there was public pressure so that very clearly I think was a great disservice to her and then by the time it came forward there was this political firestorm ongoing and this race instigated by the other side by the right to the finish line where they were just rushing rushing rushing and then when Ramirez his claim made its way to the hill and was being investigated they actually tried to accelerate the timeline and and I know that there's been some contention about Ford's this is and that she couldn't necessarily come up with people who would go on the record saying that they were there but Ramirez especially had I mean of witnesses up to and including a guy who saw her crying right afterwards and recounting the fact pattern and went on the record to say so it was very clearly a situation that merited a more thorough investigation and they and other sources who were out there I think would have been well served by a slower more methodical timeline and honestly Brett Kavanaugh would have been better served by a slower more methodical timeline where the FBI actually looked at these claims and obviously that didn't happen on the second story what was so interesting about it is you know Ford had a clear memory mm-hmm but didn't necessarily have the the witnesses that would go on record to back her up right Ramirez initially was not a hundred percent sure and then she think you quoted that she you know she took some time to think about it yeah there was a multi there was much more evidence outside of that to back it up right so how do you as a journalist kind of tackle that story which is not as as straightforward although by that point a huge matter of public interest given what's happening yeah I think that the answer is and this is the approach we took you disclose every possible question mark and this is the business of not being an advocate and sometimes that makes everyone on both sides unhappy but you've got to say here are all the possible reasons for skepticism and also here's the pretty considerable amount of evidence that suggests that this woman is telling the truth the New York Times seemed a little bit grumpy that you guys broke that story they were a little competitive about it and to his immense credit you know Dean Beck a who's a personal hero of mine ran around for you know four days making it very clear like this he had no questions about the story it was just that they got beaten in the race to get this interview but you saw in that incredibly pressurized climate how the partisans just ran with what she's referring to as the times actually after a number of my stories have run sort of paragraphs saying you know we made calls about this and it's sort of it's like an endearing times that like there it's the New York Times they're incredible you know they're the great paper of record and I think at times when they're in an arms race for a story they feel the need to say afterwards like we tried we got close Sneijder man they did the same thing yeah Jen had a great tweet that I'll read please do New York Times his best paper around but if Ramirez had talked to them on the record and they'd found a classmate who heard the identical story at the time and they knew Congress was investigating and she wanted the FBI to come in the chance they wouldn't publish zero yeah and gene said as much which which was great of them and the reason he had to say that is by that time their paragraphs saying you know we made calls about this and we couldn't get the interview had transmogrified into Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and all these Donald Trump was railing on you know she's drunk she's messed up they all sort of descended on this woman and attacked her I'm one of the talking points that they weaponized was you know well the time said they couldn't get they couldn't get an interview with her you know they couldn't get this story so therefore you know this is this is shady we and the time you had this this is a perfect illustration of the culture of falsehoods that we live in in the United States and in politics in particular right now we had on the one hand the editor of the New York Times running around saying like not true never passed on this story it never rejected in any way and then you know Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell saying I was saying the New York Times rejected this story they reported it out it wasn't supported and in fact the New York Times actually then went and ran their reporting on it they ran a long piece that was very sympathetic to Ramirez and laid out a lot of evidence in her favor but you know once you have a false political talking point out there we are in an environment where it just has a life of its own and I let her what my look and says yeah I love when Republicans are like but the New York Times didn't do it because I love the New York Times except when I hate the New York Times right right I wanted to talk about your book and I have an underbite I'm not gonna bend over cuz that's gonna go on Twitter or something I had it out earlier I won't go down there and get it either because that way that would also end up on Twitter okay writing a book is just like the most torturous exercise in the world and I really would not wish it on my worst day yeah it's horrible and you're writing another one now yeah while doing all of these things and taking down like well saving America and I think doing like finishing your PhD finished your PhD I have submitted it I need to defend it next month wish me luck thank you I have a feeling you're gonna be okay so they were like no running they you know they're great over there I'm doing a PhD at Oxford and this guy the it's a wonderful magical Harry Potter place and you really like I will have to wear my robes and everything to defend and they really like I don't think they care what's going on here with us in Canada and the United States is that a nice feeling that like they don't care about you it's a little bit so like there was this week where I'm really off topic of your vibra I filed three stories about the Cavanaugh thing I had a bunch of speeches I had to give to like important groups doing wonderful work this same week and I had to submit my 350 page PhD and it was all due at once and I did like I called the Oxford administrators and I was like hi I'm Ronan I'm a student at maudlin they have these colleges I'm in college and they all look like Hogwarts I you know hey I there's just like there's kind of there's an emergency situation with this breaking news story there's this long pause and they're like you know we've been here a thousand years so we don't care that your country is a dumpster fire you never should have left the crown you know there's still a little bit of that - yeah like ah okay so there's you know they required that a hard copy be bound and delivered to a magnificent crumbling ruin by such and such a time this is like I've been doing it I did I got it in like an hour before deadline it only took six years I used to submit my papers when I was in university if I wasn't done I would purposely like not print out the last half of it and just submit it and then later be like I just realized the last did any would actually fall for that everyone fell for that every time you can use that okay but back to my initial point was writing a book of torturous exercise your book is about your time at the State Department yes because in addition to all your other things were at the State Department and what was the story that you felt needed to be told of it it's a fabulous book there's warlords with reindeer I'm glad you caught that I did I have an actual question about that later on too but uh you should definitely get it just for the warlord with the reindeer and brother sharks they were sharks think about that sharks in warlords it was like a James Bond villains lair and Liberace I think it's what you're I compared him to - Liberace by way of a Bond villain this is general just stoom famous mass-murdering horseback sword wielding we spec warlord yes okay I'm good I have a question about him and I'm glad you said his name because I was trying to ask you the pronunciation beforehand but the traffic I was like one I don't want to embarrass myself by saying just okay now you know now I know anyway what was it a bit like this essential story that you felt needed to be told that you were gonna go through the horrible process of writing a book for well we're in an interesting moment now and the book has kind of come onto people's radars a few months after it came out again because of this conversation that we're all having about Saudi Arabia the book is about the militarization of American foreign policy and there are two phenomena that I talked about that sort of contribute to that one is we're firing all our diplomats we're denigrating the profession this has been true under a number of administration's cuz it's not sexy to say hey we want to put resources into these bureaucrats who actually make these essential deals and negotiate our way out of war and prevent us from shooting first people don't understand that work there aren't movies about that work and so on the campaign trail both Democrats and Republicans have really promised to cut back on that and when we do it leaves us flat-footed in various conflicts so I profile how much worse that's gotten under the Trump administration and have these wonderful diplomats that I tell the stories of including one who is accused of being a spy cuz nobody understands my name is Raju Robin great name another great Robin complicated Robin that one but she was a fascinating person in profile and I had worked with her in Pakistan she was not a spy as it turns out but you know there's some gray areas there that you should read the book and learn about the other side of the militarization that we're seeing in America's posture around the world is you know we centralized power at the White House we give authority to generals often to the exclusion of civilians and what you wind up with is I think I say at one point in the book you know we've changed who we bring to the table and therefore it's changed who comes to the table at the other side as well so we're bringing more generals to the table and this more militarized posture and so the resultant relationships are more militarized and I profile all these cases around the world where we have kind of made dirty deals with bad guys because it's it's militarily expedient and general dose tomb after 9/11 is a great example of that you know we were brand new to this completely new global landscape this completely new national security state and these new exigencies security-wise that had kind of given the the Bush administration carte blanche in terms of these relationships and that was a case where basically while the slow-moving bureaucrats on the civilian side we're still deciding what to do the CIA and the Penta swept in and they just started giving guns to the bad guys on the ground because the a pelagic was your enemies an enemy is your friend and these guys were willing to fight the Taliban and what's complicated about it is they did kind of affect some successes right off the bat they did topple the Taliban but the case I make here and that's why I was hanging out with the reindeer and the Sharks is that that ultimately really came back to bite us and we see this story play out over and over again and I think people are just awakening now because of this very personal very individual story of what happened to khashoggi people now are seeing how dangerous it is to lie down with the worst people in the world you know the most dangerous military regimes in the world and that's very much the thrust of the book when you were going to this warlords house and you're there to ask him about a mass grave that he doesn't to talk about that no country wants to talk about including your own are you afraid like why did you do that that's what my mom said to I'm like hey I'm in Kabul why come back a warlord I kind of kept that vague until afterwards she was she was a little concerned about that our moms get concerned when we hang out with warlords it happens Harun the I used as a prism through which to view the broader chaos that the warlords we supported have wrought on Afghanistan this case that you mentioned of a an unsolved murder mystery basically a mass grave in Afghanistan that had been covered up by first the Bush administration and really then the Obama administration - they promised an investigation they they didn't do it and then they did it on the sly secretly and like buried the results and it was all very fishy and really the guy in question the guy accused of killing these thousands of prisoners had never answered tough questions about it because of that so I figured you know if I'm posing this question of what's the fallout from these relationships as well go ask him and I was lucky to be able to question like what if he cuts my head off with oh yeah I mean I described a moment in this book where he kind of one of his sons who's in training to be a general himself kind of steps forward and he's got like I'm 13 I think on his chest and grips it a little more tightly general Dostum actually made a warlord joke at one point where he's like you know the the Russians betrayed me and the Americans betray me and this is I had just asked sort of a tough question about this and he's ravines in and it's like armed guys cut step forward by enemies like I hope you will not betray me and I'm like I will not like trying to figure out how you respond diplomatically to this and he then he sort of he waits a beat for comedic timing and then says yeah I'm talking about the schedule you're taking too long you said 20 minutes it's now been 25 you betrayed my schedule yeah I know he's a funny guy [Laughter] nobody tweet that because that'll anyway um but the book is really about this I I think part of the takeaway is that the decline of American influence in the world if you're pulling out of all all your diplomats if you're not engaged in the diplomatic discussion and I guess the question say you have you know the student to be not Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel saying we cannot rely on the United States to protect yeah doesn't matter that the United States has influence has has shrunk t do we need the United States to protect it's a question I grapple with in the in the book I mean yes Canada does but honestly the world does too were first of all were we are I think too big to fail it's really bad for everything everyone and everything if the United States goes under in some way the United States becoming a wanton and reckless military power is bad for everyone the United States becoming protectionist and isolationist economically is bad for everyone in addition to being bad for American we're too connected for it not to matter I also think from a global standpoint you have to think about who's filling that void and you know I'm careful not to demonize the idea of like Russia's ascend or China's ascent and I don't want to conflate those two things they both have very different implications but I do think we're at a moment in history where Chinese leadership will bring a very different set of ethics and priorities to a lot of places in the developing world where the United States is now pulling out and doesn't even have ambassadors a lot of the time and China is doubling down and investing heavily and really showing leadership I I think that we should all anyone who cares about human rights and peace and progress should think carefully about what that change means and you touched on this little earlier just talking about that that kind of human rights dilemma is it possible I so much of the book is about kind of American American American military choosing actions that ultimately undermine its broader goal you know you talk about alliances with with Pakistan's Intelligence Agency fighting Taliban are these miscalculations or are these arrangements just totally unavoidable in foreign policy well I have a very sober tone in the book where my proposal is not like we have to cut off all these relationships or even to propose that that's possible you're absolutely right that a lot of these entanglements are necessary evils to some extent but I do think we self-sabotage by going for those relationships too quickly and too thoughtlessly and not extricated from them at times where we can sooner and and one of the lessons I hope comes through in the book is there are solutions to this you can pull out of these toxic relationships sooner you can play hardball more aggressively and I profile cases where that's worked even in the context of these difficult relationships like our relationship with Pakistan like our relationship with Egypt I try to find the individual policy changes that have actually worked and stuck it to them and maybe helped us increase our leverage so that we can avert a crisis we can stop them when they are killing civilians the the book your affection and admiration for Richard Holbrooke is just really woven throughout the whole book and I'll but you didn't gloss over his rougher edges I'm gonna read this this passage which I just really loved he wrote voluminous ly and had the uncanny ability to speak in crisp complete paragraphs as oblivious as he could be to the sensitivities of people around him he was a detail observer of the world and an indomitable and his excitement about it in other words he was the rare [ __ ] who was worth it yeah what was it like writing about someone you were so close with and especially to not just kind of gloss over the rougher edges well he was dead when I was writing so I didn't really have to think about what he would think yeah I mean I just tried to be honest as I always do in my writing and there's a lot of complicated portraits of complicated people in this book and no one is black and white and he was a jerk a lot of the time to a lot of people but he also was an extraordinary mentor and he stood for a kind of true patriotism and that's a term that gets beaten up a lot these days but he really was someone who believed in public service and believed in serving his country and believed in this sort of dying art of diplomacy as a tool for change and so I thought his was an important story to tell warts and all can you tell us about the your job interview with him which is a really fun section of the book yeah the chapter is called the shower scene he took me to interview at I arrived at the State Department for my job interview and he very graciously I think in a show of his sort of wonderful flair for theater and also his wonderful qualities as a mentor you know took me up to the Secretary of State and had me interview with her I had no business interviewing with the Secretary of State I was applying for this very junior job and [Music] then at was sort of barking policy hardball questions at me as we went from the State Department to his townhouse in Georgetown as he packed for a trip that he was going on and then hopped into the shower like behind in a jar door but was like no no I'm just keep answering questions took a shower while asking me about you know negotiations with the Taliban and branding USAID assistance and that was Richard Holbrooke just about everyone had a story about him enthusiastically and obliviously following them into a bathroom Hillary Clinton would tell this story all the time you know and then he followed me into a ladies room in Pakistan she'd say she loved that story he didn't he wasn't aware of his surroundings he was always doing this like Aaron Sorkin rapid dialogue like not looking around them did any part of youth like when he was in the shower think like I gotta get out of here no I mean this was pre me too you know didn't occur to me throughout the book there's this this tug of war but tug of war haha military between the military and the State Department and Holbrooke at one point says like his job should be to drop the bombs when I tell him and then there's also this acknowledgement that the State Department isn't perfect either and has you know it's bureaucracy what do you think is the right division between military and diplomacy this this talk or might well we are a civilian land government and I think you need both of those sides of the United States foreign policy apparatus and the intelligence community which is some also something different and also has its pros and cons there are brave public servants risking a lot in each of these branches of government and there's a reason we have in the States this system of checks and balances and and that should be reflected in the policy conversations in the White House too I think a a well oiled highly functioning NSC the National Security Council at the White House gives equal time to these different perspectives but that is almost impossible to achieve there's a very little American history where that's actually what it's looked like I mean by and large the Pentagon is always going to be vastly more resourced and the peril is that that creates an environment where there isn't just more time given to the voices from the Pentagon but all the time given over to that so 50/50 50/50 would be great 50/50 would be real progress right now and and I think you know that this can all sound very kind of internal and inside baseball and who's in the room this is the right crowd they want this is a smart crowd so you guys care but this also affects lives around the world I mean this is why we end up in these unchecked alliances with dictators and strongmen and when we disempower our diplomats and have a president who is constantly sort of calling up these strongmen and saying they're fantastic and wonderful and amazing it sends a signal around the world it gives carte blanche to dictators who are cracking down on journalists and cracking down on dissidents it's really bad it's really dangerous one of the most powerful I think moments in the book is when John Kerry comes out to announce the Iran deal another example of a flawed flawed maybe deal with the devil but necessary and he talks about his own military history in Vietnam and he says I learned in war the price that is paid when diplomacy fails and I made a decision that if I ever was lucky enough to be in a position to make a difference I would try to do so I know that war is the failure of diplomacy and the failure of leaders to make alternate decisions you come away from this book feeling like at least in the new in the near future there are opportunities for diplomacy but they're being gutted and we know what happened with the Iran deal in the end so I mean are you optimistic going forward I certainly wouldn't have written this book if I thought it was a eulogy to diplomacy and this was all in the past I think to some extent this goes in cycles I think that there are great examples of turnaround jobs particularly in the middle of a two-term presidency the Obama administration really succumbed to an overly militarized process in a number of critical foreign policy crises that I profile in this book and then in the second term deliberately course-corrected and I have some of his aides saying that that's what they did and you wound up very rapidly with real diplomatic achievement I mean this doesn't take decades to just get some settlements negotiated that can avoid consul conflict you know you had in the second Obama term after them really really giving over Afghanistan and a number of other situations to the generals over the objections of people like Richard Holbrooke you then had the Iran deal the thaw in relations with Cuba the Paris climate change Accord that all happened really rapidly with only a couple of years of investment in okay we're gonna double down on diplomacy that can happen again is one of the big lessons of the book you interviewed every Libyan Secretary of State mm-hmm did anyone give you a hard time did you have to twist anyone's arm or they're all like I like that she's baiting me she knows the answer yeah Hillary Clinton was really difficult and I'd worked with her for years and you know have a lot of respect for her legacy in a lot of ways and had a close personal relationship with her but she also had a very close personal relationship with Harvey Weinstein and you know her folks had reached out to me and expressed some concern about that before they tried to cancel that interview to her credit she you know he was a big Democratic donor so four years had been a big Hollywood bundler for the Clintons to her credit she did then get on the phone and go on the record for this book but I think you know was brief and perfunctory after I noted that they had expressed those concerns about Weinstein in a not off-the-record context and that I would be writing a book that had at free-living Secretary of State but one and then a pretty strange explanation for why I didn't have that one so so she did talk and I I I know from having worked for her at the State Department for a number of years that she cares passionately and earnestly about the institutions of diplomacy and you know I think there are some areas where she did fine work as a secretary of state and I think she is a committed public servant but very wrapped up in these political concerns and if you compare you know someone like John Kerry's who I didn't work for and didn't have a personal relationship with you know his comments and the degree of candor that he had and the degree of passion he had as opposed to what she says in this book it is it's a very striking difference and and even you know some of the kind of unexpected voices like Shultz you know it's these sort of ancient Republican really like I presume there's a couple who are in their 90's I mean Schultz Schultz is what 97 maybe Kissinger is 94 what was Kissinger like like he doesn't seem like a super friendly I'm Canadian I can say that so maybe you know you know I confront head-on and in the book that you know he's regarded by many serious scholars of war crimes to be a war criminal and all the ways in which his reputation is extremely divisive and he is not happy when you turn the subject to that by the way it's not like answering questions about that he tried to stop that interview all of that said you know and this is not an apology for any of the bad things he did any of the Cambodia stuff I think that should be mentioned every time his name comes up but there's just no way around it he is also a dazzling intellect and speaks in this book frankly and with tremendous insight and talks a lot about how the State Department is empty and he he's it's odd he sort of renders the problem exactly his the book renders the problem but is then less concerned about it he's like yeah something new will come along to replace that but he also he had a framing which really stuck with me I think it's the a use it as the end of the first chapter he said in the context of new administration's coming in and not wanting to do this kind of careful old-school diplomacy and more specifically in the context of Richard Holbrooke who was someone who represented an old fashioned form of influence exchanging and sparring and who literally had a set of relationships that were from the past you know he'd been in politics for decades and and really ran aground during the Obama administration with a set of younger newer players who just wanted to house clean and get rid of all these old clintonites Kissinger said in that context it's one great American myth that you can always try something new and I thought that was such a fascinating idea and it's so often true in politics and so often the root of a lot of problems we are just winding down here before I'm gonna go to audience questions but I obviously need to ask you about me too me too I mean so much especially in the journalism context we talked about you know if me to gone too far which I hate that expression but when you're writing about these stories the big criticism is that me - Rob's the accused person of due process but a lot of these claims never reach the threshold of criminal allegations and so it's kind of like what are you supposed to do if you know for these these women if there isn't a mechanism necessarily to come forward media's is one is one way I mean what are your thoughts on this idea of the due process question with me - and especially as someone who writes about these stories how you kind of tackle that you know that I found hearing these conversations play out there's like a very obvious crowd-pleasing answer to that which is something about how you know for so long women weren't her and you know we are just now beginning to grapple with these kinds of hard truths and the what about is some of them turning around and saying well what about the guys is premature and there's a lot of ways to articulate that that's you know it goes down to storm and people love that particularly in a liberal crowd that cares about human rights issues and all those things are true but I think at the same time honestly the concern is really valid and I think about it as I report out every story there are correctly different standards in courts of law and in journalism many of these cases are being reported in the way they are because the criminal justice system in the states anyway let down survivors of sexual violence and was not adequate to creating any kind of accountability or protecting others from repeat offenders and I think the Weinstein story actually illustrates in a pretty compelling way how good reporting can then lead to criminal justice proceedings where there had been an absence of those for a long time but I do still think even within those different journalistic standards that you have to think about journalistic due process you have to think about being meticulous and fair at every turn there are times in some of these investigations where I have believed with every fiber of my being that someone was telling the truth and had a claim that you know it was a discretionary area where I could have run it but I've chosen not to because I'm being really really careful and I always are on the side of being conservative and you know I think that sometimes is a a punishing maxim to stick to I'm glad I wasn't the one that knocks my I'm a mess you can for me anywhere I think that that is sometimes punishing I think that when you look at a story like the Deborah Ramirez story where we were so kind of sober in our tone and so careful about disclosing every single caveat I think that's the correct approach I think you owe it to anyone who's acute to really lay out any counter-argument that they present if you look at any of the stories the Weinsteins story the les Moonves story the Schneiderman story there is paragraphs and paragraphs of rebuttals in there and any fact that's on the side of the accused is aired very very fully and explored and if that makes it more complicated for the public to digest and if that gets weaponized in a political context that's sad but you still ultimately have to give the readers that credit and were on the side of fair and conservative yeah I'm so glad to hear you say this because I don't think people are talking about it enough because there is that sort of like maybe political pressure to to give that kind of stock answer I actually find you know me to journalism has been really quite conservative it's the same as you know if you're writing about someone who's committing a fraud you would want the same kind of the thresholds and and you know would you run a story just based on one allegation without any corroborating details at all even if you really believed them with that threshold fly if it was a different type of allegation and it sounds like you're saying that sometimes you just can't get there if you don't have that that stuff for publication yeah you you always have to be wet ready as a reporter to scrap the reporting if there are serious doubts presented about it I mean I had a case a couple of weeks ago where a very high-profile political source suddenly wanted to meet and I actually was just getting on a plane to Los Angeles it was too late to get off and I literally like got off of that flight and got on another flight back to New York and did this meeting and there was a claim about something that would have been a huge story you know would have dominated the news cycle for a week and had a material effect on like multiple investigations that are going on and I had this very emphatic primary claim from someone who was in the room that a thing had happened and I just you know I think a lot of publications would have gone with that and I couldn't Shore it up to the exact extent that I wanted because there's so much on the line you get one wrong and that's and I'm not in the business of creating a big sexy headline I'm in the business of trying to find the truth and trying to inform the public so they can make better decisions about their world and as much as that was a really interesting story and I had drafted it and was prepared to go with it the moment there was any kernel of doubt I feel very good about the fact that I just shelved that for the time being and people don't know that journalists routinely routinely do that and it's you know you go have a drink with your editor and you swear a little bit but you ultimately sleep really well that's exactly why we didn't do that yep how do you pick what story and that that is why I would add you have this situation now where those new platforms who talked about with all those delightful polite people screaming at us have also created an environment where you see kind of extreme voices on either side just putting out stories and you know you see attempts that fall flat I won't give specifics but you can all think of recent examples and people see through them and the press does a great job of descending on those and then saying hey here's why maybe we should wait a second but it's just very important to draw the distinction and not conflate the people who are put forward by sort of the hardline activists the stories that are disseminated by those as opposed to the ones that are carefully vetted by publications that you trust how do you pick which stories to promote just your inbox must just be like the most depressing you have to help make my inbox a living hell send me any tips you have seriously no send me the tips you have Canada on this side it's Canadian how quickly you forget she is the one who said all your facts belong to me and you can't do anything about it I up I will take my tall a little good night as we establish I will take your call in the extra middle of it so how do you pick so there's no simple answer to that there's just the practical limitations for one thing I don't think people fully understand that you know I have an open tip line inbox my New Yorker email address is just it gets several hundred story tips a day and this is not a complaint this is an extraordinary wonderful position to be in as a reporter obviously but there's also just the practical matter of it takes me a while to sift through them like it takes a couple of days for me to get back to people sometimes so hang in there try me again if I don't get to you and I've been doing all of this totally solo up until like two weeks ago I just started hiring for my next TV deal for HBO so I now have a couple of research I forgot to mention that to stay tuned I've not as it turns out been totally exiled from television so god bless them HBO is bankrolling like a couple of people to help me sift through the leads and and so there's a practical side of that answer which is like I'm setting up more infrastructure to to vet and pick and kind of pre-interview and assess the the substantive answer is you know you're looking at what can significantly advance the conversation because I'm only one person and there's only so much I can do and there's an odd conversation about my reporting now which is mostly an honor to see but also I think misunderstands Who I am and what I do you know people get mad that I'm not covering things right I see a lot of it and you probably got this - people are like you know well why aren't you you haven't said a thing about this thing X and and I get the frustration but I I'm a person you know and there's X number hours in the day and and only so many things I can do and so I do have to pick careful and I try to pick on the basis of what is going to most significantly expand our understanding and advance our dialogue about something really important that affects the greatest number of people possible and then beyond that then you look at kind of the bones of the story as we always all are as investigative reporters you know what degree of evidence is there how compelling is the source that's bringing it to you but I wish I had time to pursue every single claim and the fact that I'm not reporting a story doesn't mean it's not important there's also a category of story that I think is really important but I just know I won't have the time to look at and in a lot of cases what I've taken to doing is I actually I pass a lot of stories to other reporters that I respect and and one of the wonderful things about this profession that I've found is there's a fair amount of that that goes on I have literally in some cases called a beat reporter who had never met before I should say to give this guy a hat tip I once called the crime reporter at the LA Times who I had never met never had any contact with and was basically like look I'm looking at this specific case do you know anyone on the force like did you have any sources amongst the detectives that might have dealt with this thing and he gave me like you know three different leads to look at and no reporter has to do that but I really make an effort to every time I have the chance whether that's handing off stories to people that I trust and know will do a good job with them or helping a competitor like I was a source in one of the times stories about Weinstein at one point just because like those are good reporters and ultimately we're all in this together yes for the truth outside of the bubble realize how much we agonize over there's nothing worse than seeing a story and knowing it needs to be told but just you don't have the resources to do it yes and it's really heartening to me that there are enough people out there doing good work that there's usually someone I can pick up the phone and call maybe you Robin or the forty-ninth that's usual III want to just which really quickly to audience questions how are you guys doing so then we just you want a seventh-inning stretch are we good at like 10 minutes of questions 10 minutes of questions okay great first one Blaire Carrigan asked question that I was gonna ask you and then I saw it and I was like I'll just wait has your notoriety helped you gain access during the investigative process or has it presented obstacles do people freak out when it's like it's Ronan Farrow I yeah there was like there was a Halloween costume that some company was selling online of like incoming call maybe Ronan Farrow and the caption on the website was like it's the scariest costume the the answer is overwhelmingly it has helped I'm relieved to say I think people despite all of this partisan BS flying around I think people by and large understand that I am in this for one thing and one thing only which is a big true story and so you know people across the political spectrum do come to me with really tough claims that require a lot of complicated investigation and I think that that to the extent that there's a public profile you know it helps people understand that I have a track record for doing that sort of thing so mostly it's a really good thing it helps people find me it helps me find stories when I then need to like brow feed people into talking if they know something about a story it gives me a little extra pull that I say that it's mostly on that side rather than completely on that side because it is also true that people freak out when I call give me an example of someone freaking out when you call oh I definitely had people who I just say my name and they hang up you know but the thing is there's all these it's like it's become this running joke in the States like you know like SNL will do jokes about it or like there was a South Park episode Oh we're like you know Cartman is constantly threatening to call Ronan Farrow but the thing is the vet if you happen to get a call from me the vast majority of my calls are not like I have some terrible information about you it's like hey you may know something about something can you help and I don't really ambush people it's interesting there's there's a very different type of journalism which I think when we sort of envision like a like a tough interview or something this is what we think of like the ambush and I've done that as like a sort of a you know thankless and and generic TV reporter I've like run after politicians on the American Capitol and you know thrust mics into their face there was that Washington Post story recently by Ben Terris fantastic reporter where he quoted Kellyanne Conway as saying like put that on background she was she was disparaging her husband she was because he's always tweeting against Trump and she said something like you know oh yeah I mean on that front on that front totally I love that it seems like a fantastic relationship but she was like you know I just can't believe that you know someone would would go against their wife in that way it's such a betrayal attribute that to a source familiar with the relationship and and he was like you can't do that afterwards like we're on the record it's amazing we live in an amazing time and there's nothing wrong with that journalistically but it's actually completely alien to what I do I in these stories as supposedly scary as they are I don't really ambush people people say all kinds of self incriminating things that I don't run I give people a lot of kind of leeway in deciding how their participation will happen and how it'll be used and I think people know that I will respect ground rules really fastidiously and even or on the side of kind of working with them on that because it's just different than that kind of breaking news interview that I just described that that reporter Ben terrace was doing you know it's these investigations often take months and months and you really have to work with sources in them so I guess all I'm saying is in some ways it's not that scary right I need to look at that story I missed that one do you think it's possible that mr. Weinstein will escape the consequences of his behavior Audrey Devlin from a criminal standpoint I mean I would say that there have already been very material consequences I mean I think one of the reasons I kept going even as all that was coming down on me was it was apparent to me that this was a public safety issue and that there were you know young women being sent to work for him and he was in a position of power where he could still abuse that power and it really did appear to be a pattern that was both numerous and recent so I think in that respect he is now someone who has been neutralized as like a public safety risk to a really significant extent in terms of the criminal justice proceedings you know part of what I reported on most deeply was claims that the DA's office was corrupt in New York and inexplicably didn't pursue charges when they had a recording of him admitting to a sexual assault which I later obtained there was a lot of talk from sources around Weinstein and the DA's office that there was some kind of a promise that they'd destroy that evidence obviously it survived I wrote an entire article about this chummy relationship between Weinstein's lawyers and the people at the DA's office and the fact that his two main lawyers had contributed to the DA's campaign shortly before they made that decision to drop the charges and that he hired firms that were specifically staffed by former members of the DA's office in order to neutralize those claims and kind of throw a lot of dirt on the woman bringing forward that particular allegation the history does not inspire confidence is what I would say and I have not been surprised to see the same dynamic playing out with an incredibly aggressive legal defense on Weinstein side and a lot of dysfunction on the New York DA's office side there's a deep rift between the cops and the DA in New York you know I think probably especially here on the other side of the border it's hard to understand the distinction but these are totally different entities the actual we don't have elections either for for DA's see that makes a lot of sense that would solve a lot I will say if you call a DA in the u.s. they'll talk to you as a journalist which is great and in Canada everyone's like I don't know I'm at Tim Hortons I can't really up the phone I really do need to go to Tim Hortons before I live you do we'll do it after um okay I want to go to Monica Victor OVA do you think the recent pattern of men suing their accusers introduces a financial problem that will rollback gains women have made and speaking out through me too so there's obviously been this the case of the this shitty media Mentalist more Road onigen being sued in Canada we've have a very high-profile case of an author here Steven Galloway suing a number of women as a journalist is something like I worry about what if someone's gonna sue my source but not me mmm I want them to sue me because the globe pays for me we got a is something that is happening in the United States just a concern so that's interesting I mean my reading of the fact pattern has just been different like I what I've seen overwhelmingly is that my sources have not been legally threatened in the ways that they feared even those who you know breached various NDA's which is a pretty high number of see they're talking dozens and sources who breached NDA's across all these different political stories sexual violence related stories I haven't seen anyone get sued I am very concerned about the climate of leaker prosecutions in the United States you know I've had people come forward the story I broke about Michael Cohen's financial records for instance that's that's a source who participated and leaked some documents knowing that it could carry years of jail time and I think sincerely was trying to perform a public service in doing so and there can be reasonable disagreement about whether that source achieved that but I do think that there should be an attitude of forbearance on the part of the government in cases like that where someone is leaking earnestly to try to contribute positively to the public discussion and we have seen a steady increase in leaker prosecutions under Obama and then vastly more so under Trump wants to open up libel laws yeah so that's bad and scary last question god help her Hannah Alper I'm 15 and I want to be a journalist while I'm older yes I love these questions to vice Ana wherever you are thank you where's Hannah is Hannah in the cruiser there's Hannah Tian in the middle oh hey Hannah Hannah thank you for coming I am so grateful every time I hear from a young person that they want to do this and I hope all of our talk about how difficult and dangerous it can sometimes be doesn't dissuade you from that it's such important work it's so fulfilling I'm so grateful every time I have the chance to expose something meaningful to help amplify a voice that isn't being heard I wouldn't do anything else in the world and you've done everything else in the way I write I know because I've tried literally all the things and and the fact is what I see out there right now is a wonderful set of people doing this that I'm inspired by yourself included and also a need for more of it so I hope you do that and I hope you're the answer to that quandary of how do we go forward and how do we break more of these stories and how do we hold the powerful accountable what it's going to take is more people like Hannah saying yeah I'm going to do this thing - it's a hassle but it's really worth it Ronen it was so lovely and amazing to have you here it's worse the parking tickets some of you might get that's what you get for driving in Toronto that's too bad I do want to now welcome to the stage the president and executive director of the Canadian journalism foundation Nathalie turvy this has been a superb hour of discussion on behalf of the Canadian journalism foundation and the entire audience I'd like to thank Ronan Farrow for joining us in Toronto and for sharing with us his most precious resource his time we're so thrilled we could honor you in person for being a tireless defender of the vulnerable and voiceless you're brave sources we all benefit from your courage your tenacity in your journalistic integrity thank you again for being here I'd also like to thank another journalistic dynamo Robin Doolittle her own her own investigative work is making a difference in Canada at changing lives and the status quo and we are so honored she could lead tonight's discussion for more than 25 years the cjf has been working for better journalism our motto as journalism goes so goes democracy feels more relevant than ever in these challenging and unpredictable times and part of our mandate is this public speaker series where we explore the challenges facing the industry and we highlight the power of journalism to hold the world around us accountable we have two terrific events coming up to close our season and we hope you'll join us on November 8th Suzanne Craig yet another journalistic powerhouse is in Toronto she's a fellow Canadian and she's here to talk about how Trump got rich and the story behind her massive investigation published last month in The New York Times and on November 29th we have a Canadian exclusive a book launch with venerable former editor of The Guardian Alain respirator who's here in Toronto to talk about his biggest stories with the Guardian think Edward Snowden and phone hacking and about his new book breaking news and what it means to journalism in North America and globally you can have a look at our social media for details on these upcoming events the see Jeff's work would not be possible and we could not make a difference without the generous and dedicated support of our sponsors many of whom are with us tonight through your contributions we can advance the dial on news literacy in Canada and we can offer important fellowships and awards for indigenous journalists journalists shedding light on women's equality issues and valuable internships for emerging investigative journalists with a hope to inspire the future Ronan Pharaohs and Robin Doolittle's I want to thank the Globe and Mail our media partner for tonight's talk and our thanks again to Accenture Canada a longtime cjf supporter and our sponsor tonight to close out the program please join me in welcoming Theresa abdun she's a former journalist and director of media and analyst relations with Accenture thank you [Applause] Thank You Natalie and Robin and David for leading such an incredible evening and thank you so much Ronan for sharing your incredible views thanks everyone for joining this evening I can see by your faces that you're as moved as I am by our speaker tonight now it's up to all of us to ask ourselves what are we going to do with what we heard tonight there is a thing we like at Accenture one that our prime minister likes to quote from from Graham would change has never happened this fast before and it will never be this slow again Ronan Farrow is the ultimate disrupter and driving change because he pursues the truth it is expensive it is hard and it takes courage and it doesn't happen without support the very best things so we can do tonight is to be inspired to continue to read and pay for the works of journalists like Ronan Farrow and then use what we learned to make decisions to build the kind of world that we all want to live in in our organizations our communities our schools our places of worship and among our family and friends we must support and subscribe to news organizations that are giving change agents like Ronan Farrow the platform to tell us what we didn't know that we needed to know which is all to say that's why it's important to me and to all of us at Accenture to support the Canadian journalism foundation we do all that we can to foster the kind of ethical respectful an egalitarian world that we want to live and work in today and finally a big thank you to all of you for coming out tonight to support the cjf as their mission statement says and as Natalie just said as journalism goes so goes democracy thank you both for coming out to support thank you for coming out to support both tonight good night [Applause]

Channel: CJFvideo

Views: 70,619

Rating: 4.7158084 out of 5

Keywords: journalism, media

Id: 25grufuBxl8

Length: 95min 15sec (5715 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018