#andrew lack

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

US: https://amzn.to/2OFjE5t

Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill, uncovers new allegations regarding NBC News chief Andrew Lack, the man accused of mishandling sexual-harassment complaints at the company. Lack himself reportedly preyed on young female employees, two of which spoke to Farrow for Catch and Kill. Insiders told “Page Six” that the allegations in Farrow’s book have NBC News execs, including Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, “quivering in their suits.”

According to an excerpt obtained by “Page Six" Jane Wallace was an anchor on NBC’s West 57th show in the 1980s and Lack was her executive producer. She describes Lack, who was married at the time, as “almost unrelenting” in asking her out for dinner “every day for almost a month” under the guise of celebrating her contract. “If your boss does that, what are you gonna say?” Wallace said to Farrow. “You know if you say, ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.” Their sexual relationship was “ultimately consensual, but I didn’t just get flirted with. I got worked over,” she said.

When their relationship came undone, Wallace remembers Lack threatening her career. “As she left the show, she recalled him yelling, ‘You will never get credit,’” Farrow writes. “Then the network deployed a tactic that the public was barely conscious of at the time: It offered her a substantial payout to sign a binding nondisclosure agreement.” Once she left the company, Wallace felt “disgusted” and said, “If [Lack] hadn’t been like that, I would have kept that job.” A source close to Lack told “Page Six” that Wallace’s charges are “dead wrong” and that there was no “retaliation.”

Another young employee, Jennifer Laird, spoke to Farrow about what she called a “hostile” relationship with Lack. “When Laird asked to be reassigned, Lack wouldn’t allow it,” Farrow writes. “He compelled her to work longer hours, and on weekends, and proposed she cancel vacations.” In the book, a rep denies that Lack retaliated in any way.

The NBC News chairman came under fire last year when it was revealed that he mishandled sexual-harassment complaints, including one about his former friend Matt Lauer, and one at his previous company, Sony BMG Music Entertainment. In Catch and Kill, Farrow also suggests that Lack was involved in killing Farrow’s investigation into Harvey Weinstein. In a September 2017 phone call, Farrow reports, Lack told Weinstein’s attorney, “We’ve told Harvey we are not doing a story.” A month later, Oppenheim had Farrow sign a statement saying his Weinstein story “failed to meet the network’s standards.” In an internal memo to staff obtained by People on Wednesday, Lack denied Farrow’s claims that they tried to cover up the Weinstein story, calling the report “fundamentally untrue.”

“After seven months, without one victim or witness on the record, he simply didn’t have a story that met our standard for broadcast nor that of any major news organization,” Lack wrote in the memo. “Not willing to accept that standard and not wanting to get beaten by the New York Times, [Farrow] asked to take his story to an outlet he claimed was ready to publish right away.” Farrow’s producer for the segment, Rich McHugh, refutes this in a new Vanity Fair article. McHugh corroborates that NBC, specifically Lack, Oppenheim, and MSNBC president Phil Griffin, “personally intervened to shut down our investigation of Weinstein,” made “at least 15 calls” to Weinstein about the story, and “refused to allow me to follow up on our work after Weinstein’s history of sexual assault became front-page news,” he wrote. He also includes statements from both former Weinstein Company employee Emily Nestor and Rose McGowan stating that they were willing to name Harvey Weinstein on air. (In a statement to Vanity Fair, NBC maintained that Nestor was “unwilling to be outed.”)

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/z4pUdA

NBC documentary looks at images that propelled civil rights

NEW YORK /March 21, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) — Gruesome images of a lynched Emmett Till were seared into the minds of many black Americans in 1955 and helped lead to the modern civil rights movement. But few whites knew of their existence at the time.

That reality is at the top of NBC’s two-hour documentary about how images propelled the civil rights effort. The film premieres Saturday as the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King‘s assassination approaches.

Till was the 14-year-old black Chicago boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, killed after a white grocery store clerk claimed he treated her rudely. Decades later, she recanted her story. That was far too late to save Till from being bludgeoned, shot in the head and thrown into a river. Two men were acquitted of the crime, even though they later admitted to it.

Given a casket nailed shut, Till’s mother ordered it open and Jet magazine took pictures of his horrible maimed head, beaten beyond recognition.

“For a mainstream, news audience, my guess is a large number of people knew his name, but didn’t really know what happened, which is the best and highest calling for a documentary like this,” said NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack. “Seeing these pictures underscores what happened, what really happened, why the murder of Emmett Till was such a shocking and important event in the civil rights movement.”

There’s no evidence that NBC ever showed the picture of Till’s body until a “Today” show story on the anniversary of his death in 1985, the network said. NBC wasn’t alone among the mainstream media. “It was a different America,” Lack said.

As if to make amends, the documentary shows the image of a murdered Till seven times. NBC compared Mamie Till’s insistence that the brutal truth of what happened to her son be made visible to actions 2016 by the girlfriend of Philando Castile, who streamed the aftermath of his shooting by a police officer outside of St. Paul, Minnesota where he had been pulled over for a busted light.

Mamie Till went to Jet because, at the time, it was the top news source for black America, said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who participated in the documentary. “If you were a mother in Mamie Till’s position, you wouldn’t go to NBC or CBS or even The New York Times,” she said.

The pictures “took the issue of lynching away from the grainy photographs of a body hanging in the woods,” she said. The anniversary of Till’s death was later chosen as the date of King’s March on Washington, she noted.

“The civil rights movement never forgot Emmett Till,” Reid said. “He was to that movement what Trayvon Martin was to Black Lives Matter, a symbol that remained incredibly potent.”

NBC’s documentary shows how King innately understood the power of images beamed by the still-infant medium of television. A peaceful march or sit-in could draw yawns from a general public, yet a march of well-dressed children set upon by police with dogs and fire hoses produced pictures that made many Americans recoil when they saw them on the evening news.

Repeatedly, King could count on racists to reveal themselves and provide the pictures he needed to give the movement momentum. Many demonstrations were planned before noon to give enough time for film to be delivered to New York to be shown on the network evening news.

Noted civil rights icon John Lewis is quoted in the documentary as saying, “without television, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.” The movement changed television, too: evening news programs expanded from 15 minutes a day to half hour to keep up with the news.

Lack said he also hoped the documentary would give attention to some notable black journalists from the time. Two examples: Ernest Withers, who took the picture of a man who stood in the courtroom and pointed to Till’s murderers during their trial, and L. Alex Wilson, who followed black students integrating a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and continued walking despite being beaten by a crowd of angry whites.

The documentary was initially made for MSNBC but, midstream, Lack said he felt compelled to request a prime-time window on the network. Once common, documentaries are now such a rarity on network television that NBC said it hasn’t aired a two-hour film like this since 2004.

It is being repeated on MSNBC Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.

Something remarkable is going on — America is being fumigated. Along with the outing of sexual creeps and perverts from the Hollywood miasma, the MSM swamp, populated largely by liberals and Democrats, is also being drained. There were the eight journalists who either resigned or were fired for sexual misconduct. Among them are major figures in liberal journalism, like Leon Wieseltier,…