Ronan Farrow article in NYT

Overall, Smith makes the over-arching claim that Farrow has built a brand as a so-called “#resistance journalist” in the era of #MeToo by hinting at and suggesting conspiracies without citing any direct evidence to back it up. Farrow himself addressed this critique in an interview last year with Rolling Stone: “Conspiracies aren’t fake. Conspiracies happen all the time. Conspiracy is a legal term of art that produces tangible legal charges with some frequency. What I document in this book is not a conspiracy theory,” he said at the time.

Smith, however, takes this criticism one further, arguing that the suggestions of conspiracies at the heart of Catch and Kill are part and parcel of a larger cultural shift toward speculation and away from fact-based reporting. “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” Smith writes. “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.”