Once you read Catch and Kill, any doubts you may have been harboring over the last few years that the terms liberal, conservative or feminist have lost much of their meaning will grow more certain. This is a book about the exercise of power in the Hollywood/New York nexus of commerce and media. The villains are Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer, but they were enabled and supported by the vast resources of NBC, its executives and those of Comcast, private Israeli and American surveillance agencies, the National Enquirer, battalions of lawyers and flacks, and the silence of powerful men and women who had known of Weinstein and Lauer’s abuses for years (even decades). The victims, many of whom rise to heroic measures in finally shaking off their fear and trauma, are the many, many women (I lost count) who suffered harassment, sexual assault and rape.
Those victims were betrayed by Network and Studio men and women who gave fundraisers for Democratic candidates and liberal causes, by sleazy tabloid owners and their minions who also serviced Trump and conservative causes, and by women in their role as lawyers and in HR positions who operated as informants and who funnelled information to Weinstein in an attempt to discredit his accusers.
There are heroes — first and foremost, the women who came forward and spoke truth to power, Ronan Farrow (who is honest about his own ambitions and how they sometimes affected his drive to report this story), his producer at NBC, and the staff of The New Yorker and David Remnick. The New Yorker, as an institution, is revealed to have the best fact checking processes of any media power and in Remnick and his people, a collective prudence, wisdom and integrity.
Farrow’s book moves me farther along in drawing conclusions that have to do with power and political language regardless of policy positions or political affiliations. For example, that the terms used to describe political positions or beliefs have been rendered empty by corruption and cowardice, that too many people with real influence — powerful women who claim to serve the oppressed, powerful men who claim to adhere to standards of truth — are so often revealed as merely servants of the more powerful, protective of their own ambition, and willing to dispose of their honor and integrity so that they may be seen by others as movers and shakers. Farrow makes my point explicit: “But we did publish, and the story reverberated like a gunshot. On one program after another, television personalities expressed disbelief. What did it say about the gulf between the powerful and the powerless that wealthy individuals could intimidate, surveil and conceal on such a vast scale? (329)”
Along with She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, this is one of the five or six best books I’ve read this year primarily because its subject matter is skillfully reported, and because of their matching conclusions, that those institutional forces that wish to make women less than human, are systemic and go well beyond the story of a few awful men and their protectors.
