好英语网他揭露了韦恩斯坦性丑闻，但他的报道真的无懈可击吗？
It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.”
这是一篇令人啧啧称奇的报道，出自《纽约客》的知名记者，标题夺人眼球：《丢失的文件致迈克尔·科恩的财务记录泄漏》。
In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities.
在文章中，记者罗南·法罗(Ronan Farrow)称财政部内部出现了一些可疑的事情：一名公务员注意到，特朗普总统的私人律师科恩的记录在2018年春天从政府数据库神秘消失了。法罗援引这位不愿透露姓名的公务员的话说，这些记录的消失让他非常担心，于是向媒体泄露了其他财务报告，以引起公众对科恩财务活动的警觉。
2018年，好莱坞制片人哈维·韦恩斯坦因性侵指控在曼哈顿刑事法庭受审。
The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.
这个故事产生了极其强烈的反响，MSNBC电视台的克里斯·海斯(Chris Hayes)称其为“一个关于吹哨人的令人震惊的故事”，他的同事雷切尔·马多(Rachel Maddow)以“陨石撞地球”来形容。国会民主党人要说法，财政部承诺展开调查。
Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.
据检察官和法庭文件显示，在发表两年后，法罗报道的内容基本都不属实。财政部关于迈克尔·科恩的记录从未“消失”。这只是美国国税局(Internal Revenue Service)分析师约翰·弗莱(John Fry)的一面之辞，他后来承认犯下了非法泄露机密信息的罪行。
The records were simply put on restricted access, a longstanding practice to prevent leaks, a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes. And Mr. Fry’s leaks had been encouraged and circulated by a man who was barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article, the now-disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.
那些记录只是提高了访问权限，这是防止泄密的惯常做法，法罗在他的报道中一度提及这一可能性，但称这种可能微乎其微。弗莱的泄密行为得到了一个人的怂恿和散播，这在法罗的文章里也没有提及，那个人就是现已名誉扫地的律师迈克尔·阿韦纳蒂(Michael Avenatti)，科恩的一个死敌。
Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting. The child of the actress Mia Farrow and the director Woody Allen, he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize.
法罗现在可能是美国最著名的调查记者，一个难得的名记，他走的是与大多数同行截然相反的道路：一开始是脱口秀主持界的神童，后来逐渐成为了硬调查报道记者。他的母亲是女演员米娅·法罗(Mia Farrow)，父亲是导演伍迪·艾伦(Woody Allen)，他的报道往往导致舆论哗然，并带来深远的影响，尤其是他揭露了一些有权势的男人在好莱坞、电视圈和政界糟蹋年轻女性的故事，为他赢得了普利策奖。
I’ve been watching Mr. Farrow’s astonishing rise over the past few years, marveling at his ability to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time, especially the sexual misconduct of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which culminated with Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in February just before the pandemic took hold. But some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.
在过去的几年里，我一直在关注着法罗飞速的崛起，惊叹他的能力，总能挖到定义这个时代的报道，特别是好莱坞制片人哈维·韦恩斯坦(Harvey Weinstein)的性丑闻，就在疫情蔓延之前，韦恩斯坦于2月被定罪，令这一事件达到高潮。但他工作的某些方面也让我忍不住想，法罗有时候是不是飞得离太阳太近了。
Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.
因为，如果你仔细阅读法罗在《纽约客》上的报道，及其2019年的畅销书《捕杀：谎言、间谍和保护性奴役者的阴谋》(Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)，难免疑窦丛生。他的叙事具有难以抗拒的电影风格——黑白分明的英雄与坏蛋，却往往缺乏复杂的事实以及引起麻烦的细节。有时候，他并不总是遵循新闻必须事实确凿和严格披露的典型语气，或者他所暗示的阴谋非常诱人却无法证实。
Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.
32岁的法罗不是谎话精。他的报道可能会产生误导，但他没有凭空捏造。不过，他的工作揭露了在唐纳德·特朗普时代蓬勃发展的一种“抗争新闻”的弱点：如果记者出色地游走在社交媒体的浪潮中，并对最不受欢迎的公众人物口诛笔伐，那么公平与开放的旧规则似乎更像是障碍，而非基本的新闻要求。
That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.
这可能是一种危险的方法，特别是在真相和共同认可的事实遭到攻击的时刻。
The New Yorker has made Mr. Farrow a highly visible, generational star for its brand. And Mr. Farrow’s supporters there point out the undeniable impact of his reporting — which ousted abusers like New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and helped rewrite the rules of sex and power in the workplace, sometimes with his colleague Jane Mayer. Ken Auletta, The New Yorker writer who helped Mr. Farrow take his work from NBC to the magazine, said that the important thing is that Mr. Farrow helped reveal Mr. Weinstein’s predatory behavior to the world and bring him down.
《纽约客》将法罗变成他那一代人的耀眼明星，成为其品牌的象征。法罗在那里的支持者指出他的报道产生了不可否认的影响——赶走了诸如纽约检察长埃里克·施耐德曼(Eric Sc hneiderman)等施虐者，并有时甚至与他的同事简·梅耶(Jane Mayer)一起重写了工作场所的性别和权力规则。《纽约客》作者肯·奥莱塔(Ken Auletta)帮助法罗将他的报道从NBC带到杂志上，他说，重要的是，法罗帮助向世人揭露了韦恩斯坦的好色成性，并让他身败名裂。
“Are all the Ts crossed and the Is dotted? No,” Mr. Auletta said of some of Mr. Farrow’s most sweeping claims of a conspiracy between Mr. Weinstein and NBC to suppress his work.
在描述法罗最为偏激的断言——韦恩斯坦与NBC联手打压他的工作的阴谋论——时，奥莱塔说：“每个字都是巨细靡遗的吗？并不是。”
“You’re still left with the bottom line — he delivered the goods,” Mr. Auletta said.
奥莱塔说：“但你得到了最基本的东西——他做了需要做的事。”
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, defended Mr. Farrow’s reporting, calling it “scrupulous, tireless, and, above all, fair.”
《纽约客》的编辑戴维·雷姆尼克(David Remnick)为法罗的报道辩护，称其“谨慎、不懈，尤其重要的是，公正”。
“Working alongside fact checkers, lawyers and other editorial staff members at The New Yorker, he achieved something remarkable, not least because he earned the trust of his sources, many of whom had to relive traumatic events when they talked to him,’’ Mr. Remnick said in a statement. “We stand by Ronan Farrow’s reporting. We’re proud to publish him.”
“在《纽约客》的事实核查员、律师和其他编辑人员通力协作下，他取得了出色的成就，这不仅是因为他赢得了消息来源的信任，其中许多人在与他交谈时不得不重温创伤性事件，”雷姆尼克在一份声明中说：“我们支持罗南·法罗的报道。我们很荣幸能发表他的作品。”
Mr. Farrow, in his own statement to The New York Times, said he brings “caution, rigor, and nuance” to each of his stories. “I’m proud of a body of reporting that has helped to expose wrongdoing and to bring important stories into public view.”
法罗在给《纽约时报》的声明中说，他为每个故事都带来了“谨慎、缜密，以及微妙”。“作为帮助揭露不法行为并将重要事件带入公众视野的报道者，我感到自豪。”
It’s impossible, however, to go back and answer the question of whether Mr. Farrow’s explosive early reporting would have carried such power if he’d been more rigorous and taken care to show what he knew and what he didn’t. Is the cost of a more dramatic story worth paying? Because this much is certain: There is a cost.
如果法罗对于自己知道和不知道的事情进行更加严苛和细致的关注，他早期的爆炸性报道还会具有这样的威力吗？然而，我们不可能回到过去，所以无法回答这个问题。我们值得为更具戏剧性的报道付出代价吗？因为有一点是肯定的：代价是存在的。
That becomes clear in an examination of Mr. Farrow’s debut article on Mr. Weinstein, back in October 2017, which provided the first clear, on-the-record claim that Mr. Weinstein had gone beyond the systematic sexual harassment and abuse revealed days earlier by The Times into something that New York prosecutors could charge as rape. The accuser was Lucia Evans, a college student whom Mr. Weinstein had approached at a private club, and then later lured to his office with a promise of acting opportunities. There, she told Mr. Farrow, he forced her to perform oral sex on him.
仔细阅读法罗于2017年10月发表的首篇有关韦恩斯坦的文章，这一点显而易见。该文提供了第一个明确的、有记录的说法，即韦恩斯坦已经犯下可被纽约检察官指控为强奸的罪行，超越了几天前时报所揭露的有预谋的性骚扰和性虐待。指控者是大学生露西娅·埃文斯(Lucia Evans)，韦恩斯坦曾在一家私人俱乐部与她会面，后来诱骗她到他的办公室，并承诺提供出演机会。她告诉法罗，在那里他强迫她给他口交。
But a fundamental principle of the contemporary craft of reporting on sexual assault is corroboration: the painstaking task of tracking down friends and neighbors a traumatized victim may have confided in soon after the assault, to see if their accounts align with the victim’s story and to give it more — or less — weight. In much of the strongest #metoo reporting, from the stories about Mr. Weinstein in The New York Times to The Washington Post’s exposé of Charlie Rose and even some of Mr. Farrow’s other articles, clunky paragraphs interrupt the narrative to explain what an accuser told friends, and often, to explore any conflicting accounts. Americans are now watching this complicated form of reporting play out in the stories about Tara Reade, who has accused Joe Biden of assaulting her.
但是，对性侵进行报道的一项基本原则是佐证：这是一个辛苦的工作，即在性侵发生后不久，寻找受害者可能倾诉过的朋友和邻居，以核对他们的说法是否与受害者的故事相吻合，使故事更具说服力——或导致说服力减弱。在最有力的“#我也是”报道中，从《纽约时报》对韦恩斯坦的报道，到《华盛顿邮报》曝光查理·罗斯(Charlie Rose)，甚至包括法罗的其他一些文章里，故事的叙述中穿插着突兀的段落，以解释指控者向朋友的倾诉，并且常常会对任何有争议的说法进行探讨。这种复杂的报道形式，可见于美国人现在正在关注的塔拉·里德(Tara Reade)的故事中，她指控乔·拜登(Joe Biden)对她性侵。
Mr. Farrow’s first big story on Mr. Weinstein offered readers little visibility into the question of whether Ms. Evans’s story could be corroborated. He could have indicated that he had, or hadn’t, been able to corroborate what Ms. Evans said, or reported what her friends from the time had told the magazine. He wrote instead: “Evans told friends some of what had happened, but felt largely unable to talk about it.”
在法罗关于韦恩斯坦的第一篇重大报道中，读者难以看明白埃文斯的说法是否能得到证实。他本可以暗示自己能够或者不能够证实埃文斯所说的话，或者报道她的朋友们当时已经告诉杂志的内容。然而他只是写道：“埃文斯告诉朋友们一些发生的情况，但觉得自己很大程度上无法谈论它。”
It appears Mr. Farrow was making a narrative virtue of a reporting liability, and the results were ultimately damaging.
看来，法罗叙事方面的优点变成了报道方面的缺点，而结果最终是破坏性的。
A crucial witness, the friend who was with Ms. Evans when both women met Mr. Weinstein at the club, later told prosecutors that when a fact checker for The New Yorker called her about Mr. Farrow’s story, she hadn’t confirmed Ms. Evans’s account of rape. Instead, according to a letter from prosecutors to defense lawyers, the witness told the magazine that “something inappropriate happened,” and refused to go into detail.
一位关键证人（埃文斯在俱乐部遇到韦恩斯坦时身边的那个朋友）后来告诉检方说，当《纽约客》的一名事实核查人员致电询问法罗的故事时，她没有证实埃文斯关于强奸的陈述。根据检察官写给辩护律师的信件，这位证人只是告诉该杂志“发生了一些不当的事情”，并拒绝透露细节。
But the witness later told a New York Police Department detective something more problematic: That Ms. Evans had told her the sexual encounter with Mr. Weinstein was consensual. The detective told the witness that her response to the magazine’s fact checker “was more consistent” with Ms. Evans’s allegation against Mr. Weinstein and suggested she stick to The New Yorker version, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorneys office later acknowledged. The detective denied the exchange, but when Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers unearthed the witness’s contradictory accounts, the judge dismissed the charge. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers gloated, though, of course, their client was ultimately convicted on other counts.
但这位证人后来对纽约警察局的一名探员说了一些更有问题的话，她说埃文斯告诉她，自己和韦恩斯坦的性接触是两厢情愿的。曼哈顿地区检察官办公室的检察官后来承认，探员告诉这位证人，她对《纽约客》事实核查人员的回应“更符合”埃文斯对韦恩斯坦的指控，并建议她坚持对《纽约客》的说法。这名探员否认了这段对话，但当韦恩斯坦的律师挖出证人自相矛盾的证词时，法官驳回了这项指控。韦恩斯坦的律师对此沾沾自喜，不过，当然，他们的当事人最终因其他罪名被定罪。
In his 2019 book, “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow dismisses the incident as an issue with a “peripheral witness” and attacks Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman for “private espionage.”
在他2019年出版的《捕杀》中，法罗淡化了该事件，称其与一名“外围证人”有关，并指责韦恩斯坦的律师本杰明·布拉夫曼(Benjamin Brafman)进行了“私人间谍活动”。
A similar problem appears at the heart of “Catch and Kill,” in a section in which he describes Matt Lauer assaulting a junior employee at NBC. In Mr. Farrow’s telling, Mr. Lauer’s accuser leaves his dressing room after the assault. “Crying, she ran to the new guy she’d started seeing, a producer who was working in the control room that morning, and told him what had happened.” Mr. Farrow and the fact checker for his book, Sean Lavery, never called “the new guy” to corroborate the story, both Mr. Lavery and the man told me.
类似的问题出现在《捕杀》的核心部分，他在其中描述了马特·劳尔(Matt Lauer)性侵NBC的一名初级员工。根据法罗的说法，劳尔的指控者在遭到性侵后离开了更衣室。“她哭着跑向她刚开始约会的新男友，一个早上在控制室工作的制片人，告诉他发生了什么。”法罗和这本书的事实核查人肖恩·拉威利(Sean Lavery)从来没有打电话给“那个新男友”来证实这个故事，拉威利和那个男人都这样告诉我。
“I might look at something and say that’s good enough, there’s enough other evidence that something happened,” Mr. Lavery said, speaking hypothetically, when I asked why he and Mr. Farrow didn’t call a potentially corroborating witness.
“我看到某件事，可能会觉得证据已经足够了，其他证据已经足以证明某些事情，”当我问拉威利，他和法罗为什么没有询问可能具有确证作用的证人时，拉威利以假设的口吻说。
But the “new guy” told me that, in fact, he doesn’t remember the scene that was portrayed in the book. He spoke on the condition he not be identified.
但是这个不愿透露姓名的“新男友”告诉我，事实上，他不记得书中描述的场景。
When I told Mr. Farrow that in an email last week, he wrote back: “I am confident that the conversation took place as described and it was verified in multiple ways.”
我上周通过电子邮件把这件事告诉法罗，他回复说：“我相信我所描述的对话发生了，并以多种方式得到了证实。”
Mr. Farrow did not share his methods. But this much is clear: Mr. Farrow and the fact checker never called the producer. And if they had, that element of the story would have been much more complicated — or would never have appeared in print.
法罗没有分享他的证实方式。但有一点是清楚的：法罗和事实核查人员从未给这位制片人打过电话。如果他们这样做了，这个故事的元素就会更加复杂——或者永远不会得到出版。
Mr. Lauer was fired from NBC, and a series of reports and an internal investigation portrayed him as a star who abused his power in the workplace for sex. He declined to speak for the record during a telephone conversation, except to say that he had found issues with the corroboration of Mr. Farrow’s reporting on him.
劳尔被NBC解雇，一系列报道和内部调查将他描绘成一名在工作场所滥用权力进行性交易的明星。在电话交谈中，他拒绝正式接受采访，只是说他发现法罗对他的报道的证据存在问题。
It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a predator like Mr. Weinstein or to shed tears over Mr. Lauer’s firing. And readers may brush aside these reporting issues as the understandable desire of a zealous young reporter to tell his stories as dramatically as he can.
对韦恩斯坦这样的掠食者很难产生什么同情，劳尔的被解雇也不值得落泪。因此读者可能会把这些报道问题放在一边——一个热心的年轻记者想要尽可能戏剧化地讲述自己的故事，这是可以理解的。
But Mr. Farrow brings that same inclination to the other big theme that shapes his work: conspiracy. His stories are built and sold on his belief — which he rarely proves — that powerful forces and people are conspiring against those trying to do good, especially Mr. Farrow himself.
但法罗以同样的倾向去写另一个塑造了全书的重大主题：阴谋。他相信强大的力量和掌权者密谋反对那些试图做好事的人，尤其是法罗本人，他很少去证明这一点，但他的故事是围绕这个信念建立起来并且说服他人相信的。
At the heart of “Catch and Kill” is an electrifying suggestion: that Mr. Weinstein blackmailed NBC executives to kill Mr. Farrow’s story on his sexual misconduct with the threat that The National Enquirer would expose Mr. Lauer’s misconduct if they did not. This is the “conspiracy” in the book’s subtitle. And it is the thread that holds together its narrative.
《捕杀》的核心是一个惊人的说法：韦恩斯坦敲诈NBC的高管，逼迫他们扼杀法罗关于自己的不当性行为的报道，否则《国民问询》(The National Enquirer)就会曝光劳尔的不当性行为。这就是该书副标题中的“阴谋”。正是这条线把故事串联在一起。
In Mr. Farrow’s telling, by the end of July 2017, he had nailed down the story of Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of sexual predation, and the NBC brass had begun to shut him down. He has said repeatedly that he had at least two women on the record for his story at the time he left NBC for The New Yorker. He told NPR in an interview, “There is no draft of this story that NBC had that had fewer than two named women.” But NBC has disputed that claim, and an NBC employee showed me what he described as the final draft of Mr. Farrow’s script, as of Aug. 7. It had no on-the-record, on-camera interviews. (It did have one strong piece of reporting that Mr. Farrow took to The New Yorker: an audio recording of Mr. Weinstein appearing to confess to an Italian model that he had groped her. )
根据法罗的讲述，到2017年7月底，他已经确定了韦恩斯坦的性侵模式，而NBC高层也已经开始阻拦他的报道。他曾多次表示，在离开NBC为《纽约客》工作时，他已经有了两名公开接受采访的女性。他在接受NPR采访时表示，“NBC得到的该报道的任何一稿里，都至少提到了两位女性的名字。”但NBC反驳了这一说法，一名NBC员工向我展示了他所说的法罗报道定稿，日期是8月7日，其中没有面对镜头的公开采访。（的确有一篇站得住脚的报道，后来被法罗带到了《纽约客》：一段韦恩斯坦的录音，似乎是他在向一名意大利模特坦白自己曾对她动手动脚。）
Nor does Mr. Farrow provide any proof that NBC executives were acting out of fear of blackmail when they refused to air his story, a central theme he promoted on his book tour. When the ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Farrow about “the suggestion that Mr. Weinstein was blackmailing NBC News,” Mr. Farrow replied, “Multiple sources do say that, and the way in which that’s framed is very careful.” Pressed on whether NBC had let the story go “because they were afraid information about Matt Lauer was going to get out,” Mr. Farrow replied, “That is what the extensive conversations, transcripts, and documents presented in this book suggest.”
法罗也没有提供任何证据，表明NBC的高管们拒绝播出他的报道是担心遭到胁迫，而这是他在巡回售书活动中宣传的一个核心主题。当ABC主持人乔治·斯特凡诺普洛斯(George Stephanopoulos)问法罗关于“韦恩斯坦恐吓NBC新闻的说法”时，法罗回答说，“有多个消息来源确实这么说过，报道对此的表述非常谨慎。”当被问及NBC是否“因为担心马特·劳尔的消息会被泄露”而放弃这个报道时，法罗回答说，“这本书中大量的对话、文字记录和文件都说明了这一点。”
But the reporting in the book does not bear that out. And in the absence of compelling proof, Mr. Farrow relies on what the critic and private detective Anne Diebel earlier this year described in The New York Review of Books as “New Journalism on the sly” — using novelistic technique to make his case. Mr. Farrow, for example, describes the facial expressions and physical gestures of NBC executives during his meetings with them, and then deduces dark motives.
但书中的报道并没有证实这一点。在缺乏有力证据的情况下，法罗依靠的是评论家和私家侦探安妮·迪贝尔(Anne Diebel)今年早些时候在《纽约书评》(New York Review of Books)上所说的“狡猾的新新闻主义”——利用小说技巧来证明他的观点。例如，法罗在与NBC高管会面时描述了他们的面部表情和肢体语言，然后推断出他们有阴暗的动机。
“If the Lauer threat was indeed made, and taken seriously, then NBC’s killing of the story is not just a case of muddy corporate cowardice; it’s a case of abject journalistic malfeasance and moral failure,” Ms. Diebel wrote. “But in the absence of persuasive sourcing, Farrow’s exploration of the alternatives is insufficient.”
“如果关于劳尔的威胁确实存在，并得到了认真对待，那么NBC封杀这个故事，就不仅仅是说不清道不明的企业怯懦那么简单；而是卑鄙的新闻渎职和道德沦丧，”迪贝尔写道。“但由于缺乏有说服力的消息来源，法罗对其他可能性的探索是不够的。”
Even Mr. Auletta, a supporter and mentor to Mr. Farrow, told me that Mr. Farrow’s central conspiracy allegation was unproven.
就连法罗的支持者和导师奥莱塔也告诉我，法罗的主要阴谋指控没有得到证实。
The one on-the-record source supporting the core conspiracy theory in “Catch and Kill” is William Arkin, a maverick journalist and acolyte of Seymour Hersh who departed bitterly from NBC soon after Mr. Farrow.
《捕杀》中唯一公开姓名支持该核心阴谋论的消息来源是威廉·阿尔金(William Arkin)，一名特立独行的记者，西摩·赫什(Seymour Hersh)的信徒，法罗离开NBC后不久，阿尔金也忿忿地离开了。
In a curious passage in “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow writes that Mr. Arkin — an ally of his at the network — told him of two anonymous sources who made the charge. In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Arkin told me that his sources, only one of whom offered a firsthand account, had been unwilling to speak to Mr. Farrow for his book. Mr. Arkin said the firsthand source told him that Mr. Weinstein had made a threat to an NBC executive about exposing Mr. Lauer, but that he doesn’t know who told his source. And he said he had no knowledge of the other elements of Mr. Farrow’s shadowy suggestions — the involvement of The National Enquirer, or whether executives actually shut down Mr. Farrow’s story because of a threat. (NBC has denied that Mr. Weinstein threatened anyone and said most of the producer’s communication was with MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, who wasn’t directly involved in the reporting on Mr. Weinstein.)
在《捕杀》中，法罗在一个不寻常的段落里写道，阿尔金——他在电视台的盟友——告诉他，有两名匿名人士提出了这个指控。在上周的一次电话采访中，阿尔金告诉我，他的消息来源中只有一人提供了第一手资料，他们一直不愿就法罗的书与他交谈。阿尔金说，提供第一手资料的消息来源告诉他，韦恩斯坦曾威胁NBC的一名高管要曝光劳尔，但他不知道是谁告诉这名消息人士的。他说，法罗的这些隐晦暗示的其他部分他并不了解——《国民问询》的参与，以及高管们是否真的因为该威胁而停止了法罗的报道。（NBC否认韦恩斯坦曾威胁过任何人，并说同韦恩斯坦的大部分沟通都是与MSNBC总裁菲尔·格里芬[Phil Griffin]进行的，格里芬没有直接参与对韦恩斯坦的报道。）
Two other NBC journalists, neither of whom would speak for the record, expressed a different view, which is shared by network executives: That Mr. Farrow was a talented young reporter with big ambitions but little experience, who didn’t realize how high the standards of proof were, particularly at slow-moving, super-cautious news networks. A normal clash between a young reporter and experienced editors turned toxic.
另外两个NBC记者都没有公开姓名，他们表达了NBC的高管们都认同的另一种观点：法罗是个有才华的年轻记者，野心很大但是缺乏经验，他没有意识到证据需要极高的标准，特别是在动作很慢、格外谨慎的新闻电视台。一个年轻记者和资深编辑之间的正常冲突变成了恶性事件。
Mr. Arkin said he agreed with NBC’s view that Mr. Farrow didn’t have the Weinstein story nailed by August 2017, when he took the story to The New Yorker. But Mr. Arkin said he also believed that NBC didn’t really want the story.
阿尔金表示，他同意NBC的观点，即法罗在2017年8月把韦恩斯坦的故事带到《纽约客》时还没有十足的把握。但阿尔金说，他也相信NBC并不是真的想做这个报道。
The right move would have been to “take a 29-year-old and you hold him by the hand and you walk him through the story,” Mr. Arkin said in a telephone interview. “Instead what they did was they took him out to the deep end and threw him in — and then they said ‘Oh my God, you can’t swim.’”
正确的做法应该是“拉着这个29岁的人，握着他的手，带他过一遍整个故事，”阿尔金在接受电话采访时说。“相反，他们把他带到深水区，把他扔了下去——然后他们说，‘哦，上帝，你不会游泳。’”
That’s an account less heroic than Mr. Farrow’s. It’s also hard to argue that NBC wouldn’t have been better off staying close to Mr. Farrow and getting the story.
这个说法并不像法罗自己所说的那么具有英雄气概。还有一点也很难说清，如果NBC支持法罗，报道这个故事，情况是否会更好。
Mr. Farrow’s other irresistible conspiracy has even less to support it: that Hillary Clinton, whom Mr. Farrow had once worked for at the State Department, also sought to kill his reporting and protect Mr. Weinstein. In “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow described receiving an “ominous” call from Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, in the summer of 2017 saying his Weinstein reporting was “a concern.” “It’s remarkable,” Mr. Farrow told The Financial Times about Mrs. Clinton during his book tour, “how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centers of power or the sources of funding around them.”
法罗的另一个引人入胜的阴谋论甚至更加无据可循：希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)——法罗曾在美国国务院为她工作过——也试图封杀他的报道，从而保护韦恩斯坦。在《捕杀》中，法罗说他在2017年夏接到克林顿的发言人尼克·梅里尔(Nick Merrill)的一个“威胁”电话，称他的韦恩斯坦报道令人“担忧”。“这真是惊人，”法罗告诉《金融时报》。“如果你威胁到权力中心，或他们周围的资金来源，即使相识多年的人也会跟你翻脸。”
But Mr. Farrow appears to have misinterpreted Mr. Merrill’s call. Mr. Merrill said at the time that Mrs. Clinton was preparing to do a documentary film with Mr. Weinstein, and the Clinton camp was trying to find out if damaging reporting was about to be published about the producer. He had no way of proving it, but another reporter he spoke to at the time about Mr. Weinstein shared with me text messages that back Mr. Merrill’s account, and contradict Mr. Farrow’s. “We’re about to do business with him unless this is real,” Mr. Merrill wrote the other reporter on July 6. In other words, Mr. Merrill was trying to protect his boss, not Mr. Weinstein.
但是法罗似乎对梅里尔的电话做了误读。梅里尔当时说，克林顿正准备与韦恩斯坦一起拍摄纪录片，而克林顿团队试图确认关于该制片人的破坏性报道是否将要被发表。梅里尔无法证实这一点，但当时另一位与他谈论了韦恩斯坦的记者跟我分享了一些短信，支持了梅里尔的说法，并与法罗的说法相左。“我们就要和他合作了，除非这是真的，”梅里尔在7月6日写给那一位记者。换句话说，梅里尔试图保护的是他的老板，而不是韦恩斯坦。
Predictably, Mr. Farrow’s account was seized on by Mrs. Clinton’s detractors, both on the right and left, who saw it as vivid confirmation that Mrs. Clinton was a devious and manipulative character.
不出所料，克林顿的批评者——左派和右派都有——牢牢抓住法罗的说法，认为这是她为人狡猾和善于操纵的鲜活证明。
When I asked Mr. Farrow whether he has evidence for his conspiracies, he first referred the questions to his publisher, Little, Brown. Sabrina Callahan, the executive director of publicity for Little, Brown, said in an email: “The book is very careful about laying out the facts uncovered by Ronan around NBC’s contact with Weinstein and his associates — and only going as far as the facts support,” adding, “We would encourage people to read it and form their own conclusions.”
当我问法罗，他的阴谋论是否有证据支持时，他先是说这应该去问出版商利特尔布朗出版社(Little, Brown)。出版社的公关执行董事萨布丽娜·卡拉汉(Sabrina Callahan)在一封电子邮件中说：“这本书非常谨慎地列述了罗南在NBC与韦恩斯坦等人的接触中发现的事实——并且只限于事实支持的范围内，”并说，“我们鼓励人们读一读，并得出自己的结论。”
When I asked specifically about the Clinton conspiracy, she said, “Ronan‘s book recounts his own experiences.”
当我具体询问关于克林顿的阴谋论时，她说：“罗南的书讲述的是他自己的经历。”
The essence of those responses — the first legalistic in a misleading way, the second to suggest Mr. Farrow’s journalistic conclusions are based on his subjective experience — captures the deepest danger of Mr. Farrow’s approach. We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.
这些回应的实质——第一个合法但具有误导性，第二个暗示法罗的新闻结论是基于他的主观经验——正说明了法罗的方法的最大危险。我们生活的时代充满阴谋论和危险的谎言——许多是由特朗普总统推动的，而还有一些则是由他的敌人大肆宣传的——诱使普通美国人满腔热情地相信荒谬而毫无根据的说法，并强烈排斥与之相左的证据。最好的新闻报道会尽可能捕捉真相，对我们所不知道的东西要申明并保持谦卑。相反，法罗告诉我们的是我们想要相信的权力运作方式，而现在看来，他和他的公关团队似乎根本不在乎它是否真实。
On Sunday night, Mr. Farrow offered another defense of the word “conspiracy” in his book’s subtitle, saying it “accurately conveys the substance of the book and efforts by powerful men to evade accountability.” He added, “With respect to Weinstein, I carefully lay out the various levers of pressure exerted against my reporting — through personal relationships, private espionage, legal threats, etc.”
周日晚上，法罗为他的书的副标题中的“阴谋论”一词提供了另一种辩护，称其“准确地传达了该书的实质内容，并表达了权势人物为逃避问责所作的努力。”他还说：“关于韦恩斯坦，我仔细地阐述了在报道过程中他们对我施加的各种压力——通过人际关系、私下的刺探、法律威胁等等。”
I’m writing this for The Times, which competed with Mr. Farrow on many stories and shared the Pulitzer Prize with him in 2018 for coverage of sexual harassment. I wasn’t here during that coverage. What first set off my skepticism about Mr. Farrow’s work was reporting in 2018 by Jason Leopold at BuzzFeed News, when I was editor in chief there. (Disclosure: I don’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column because I retain stock options in the company, which I left in February. I’ve agreed to divest those options by the end of the year.) That reporting made clear that Mr. Farrow’s article on the Cohen documents was wrong — that they were not missing, but merely restricted to avoid leaks of sensitive materials.
我这篇文章是为时报所写，时报在许多新闻报道中与法罗有竞争关系，而且在2018年与他并列获得普利策奖，以表彰他们对性骚扰的报道。在那段时间里我还没有加入时报。引起我对法罗报道怀疑的是BuzzFeed新闻的杰森·利奥波德(Jason Leopold)在2018年的一篇报道，当时我是那里的主编。（声明：我在2月离开了BuzzFeed，由于我保留了公司的股票期权，我在这个专栏里不会对BuzzFeed进行过多介绍。我已经同意在年底之前剥离这些期权。）该报道指出，法罗关于科恩文件的文章是错误的——记录并不是消失了，而是为了避免敏感材料的泄露而被限制了。
And I found more recently when I dug into the Cohen story that for all Mr. Farrow’s attraction to screenplay-ready narratives, he missed one that was made for this moment. The real story of John Fry, the I.R.S. employee who leaked Mr. Cohen’s records, went like this: Amid the swirl of the scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mr. Avenatti, her lawyer, took to Twitter one day in May 2018, and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records.
而且最近我发现，在我深挖关于科恩的报道时，尽管法罗对任何有潜力改编为剧本的叙事都很感兴趣，但这个故事他却坐失良机。国税局员工约翰·弗莱泄露科恩记录一事的真实情况是这样的：在涉及“暴风丹尼尔斯”(Stormy Daniels)的丑闻中，她的律师阿文纳蒂于2018年5月的某天发推文要求财政部公开科恩的记录。
Mr. Fry, a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, was one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts. Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. “John: I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate this. Thank you,’’ Mr. Avenatti wrote to Mr. Fry, according to the documents, then pressed him for more.
住在旧金山的国税局老员工弗莱是阿文纳蒂的Twitter帐户的追随者之一，并且经常给他的帖子点赞。那天阿文纳蒂发推文后几小时，弗莱开始在政府数据库中搜索和下载文件，然后立即与阿文纳蒂联系，根据法院文件，他后来将科恩的机密记录发送给阿文纳蒂。“约翰：我对你的感激无以言表。谢谢，”根据文件显示，阿文纳蒂向弗莱写了这些话，然后向他索要了更多信息。
Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January. In Mr. Fry’s defense, his lawyer said he had been watching “hours and hours” of television, and described him as “a victim of cable news.”
今年1月联邦政府指控弗莱未经授权披露机密报告，弗莱最终认罪。在弗莱的辩护中，他的律师说，他每天看“好几个小时”的电视，并描述他是“有线新闻的受害者”。
Mr. Farrow has a big following on social media, too, and some of the same tendencies that undermine his reporting show up there. In January, when jurors were being selected for the Weinstein trial, they were asked what they had read about Mr. Weinstein to see if they could serve impartially. Mr. Farrow tweeted that a “source involved in Weinstein trial tells me close to 50 potential jurors have been sent home because they said they’d read Catch and Kill.”
法罗在社交媒体上也有大量追随者，在那里同样显现出了一些会削弱他的报道的迹象。1月，当选择韦恩斯坦审判的陪审员时，他们被问及对韦恩斯坦的了解，以了解他们是否可以公正地履行陪审义务。法罗发推说：“一名参与韦恩斯坦审判的消息来源告诉我，将近50位潜在陪审员因为说他们读过《捕杀》而被刷掉。”
Mr. Farrow was not in the courtroom that day, and he told me last week that his source stands by that figure. But the court reporter, Randy Berkowitz, told me that he recalled laughing with lawyers and court staff the day after about Mr. Farrow’s tweet, which he said was seen as “ridiculous.”
法罗那天不在法庭上，他上周告诉我，他的消息来源坚称这个数字没有错。但是，法庭记录员兰迪·伯科维茨(Randy Berkowitz)告诉我，据他回忆，在法罗发出推文的第二天，他和律师及法庭工作人员一起在笑这件事，他的推文被认为是“荒谬的”。
And Jan Ransom, a reporter who covered the trial for the Times, was there. The actual number of potential jurors who read the book, according to Ms. Ransom’s reporting? Two.
报道该审判的时报记者詹·兰森(Jan Ransom)就在法庭。根据兰森的报道，实际上有几位潜在陪审员读过这本书？两位。