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What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?
https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/what-was-the-washington-post-afraid-of.htmlThe afternoon of March 7, 2018, was go time, or so we believed. Inside a glass huddle room at the Washington Post, its walls covered with headlines from journalistic coups of the past, we began dialing numbers on a speakerphone and pressing send on carefully drafted, bullet-pointed emails. For nearly four months, investigative reporter Amy Brittain and I, then a freelancer, had been working on a follow-up to our November front-page story about sexual-harassment allegations against Charlie Rose. In the wake of our story, Rose had been fired from his gigs as a CBS This Morning anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent, and his PBS show had been canceled.
This new article had 27 additional allegations against Rose and three instances in which CBS management had been warned about him, but it went further. Our editor, Peter Wallsten, had encouraged us to ask who had known about Rose’s conduct and protected him, and whether he’d been enabled by a culture — assuming we had the reporting to back it up, of course. Answering that question had led to the then–60 Minutes boss and former network chairman Jeff Fager, who had repeatedly championed Rose at the network. That was awkward because 60 Minutes had been the Post’s partner for a just-wrapped yearlong investigation of the roots of the opioid crisis.
The Post had nonetheless kept both Amy and me on the story and, to ensure the integrity of the process, reassigned us to editors on the national desk who had never worked with Fager. So the isolation of the huddle room wasn’t just to bar distraction. It was a firewall — between us and the reporters and editors who’d just spent months in the trenches with the very men we had found ourselves investigating.
By that day in March, our draft had passed muster with layers of editors all the way up to the Post’s legendary executive editor Marty Baron and his deputy, Cameron Barr, as well as the paper’s lawyers. Now it was time for Amy and me to find out what Fager and other CBS brass had to say about the fruits of our reporting.
This new article had 27 additional allegations against Rose and three instances in which CBS management had been warned about him, but it went further. Our editor, Peter Wallsten, had encouraged us to ask who had known about Rose’s conduct and protected him, and whether he’d been enabled by a culture — assuming we had the reporting to back it up, of course. Answering that question had led to the then–60 Minutes boss and former network chairman Jeff Fager, who had repeatedly championed Rose at the network. That was awkward because 60 Minutes had been the Post’s partner for a just-wrapped yearlong investigation of the roots of the opioid crisis.
The Post had nonetheless kept both Amy and me on the story and, to ensure the integrity of the process, reassigned us to editors on the national desk who had never worked with Fager. So the isolation of the huddle room wasn’t just to bar distraction. It was a firewall — between us and the reporters and editors who’d just spent months in the trenches with the very men we had found ourselves investigating.
By that day in March, our draft had passed muster with layers of editors all the way up to the Post’s legendary executive editor Marty Baron and his deputy, Cameron Barr, as well as the paper’s lawyers. Now it was time for Amy and me to find out what Fager and other CBS brass had to say about the fruits of our reporting.
A long and devastating read.
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