And a large part of Ronan's story was to try how this worked. It wasn't that the people who knew (to varying degree) did not want to out him. They just feared for their livelihood, and sometimes more.
> And a large part of Ronan's story was to try how this worked. It wasn't that the people who knew (to varying degree) did not want to out him. They just feared for their livelihood, and sometimes more.
Correct, but my statement was about media trustworthiness. It doesn't really matter if people are keeping quite because they want to or because there's some super powerful individual that's coercing them to keep quiet, the result for the audience is the same. Why believe outlets that are covering up for the most heinous corruption and crimes imaginable? The media has a well earned reputation problem.
Also, I'm not sure why you want to make this a partisan argument. It's not, there's plenty of corruption to go around. I deliberately chose non-political examples of corruption.
* Harvey Weinstein was covered up by many in the media as detailed in Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize winning piece in The New Yorker [1]
* ABC killed a story about Jeffery Epstein in 2015 in part to retain access to the royal family. Epstein continued to sex traffic children for 3 years after this report would have aired [2]
* The BBC covered up for Jimmy Savile's pedophila (and other horrors I won't reprint here) for decades. The head of the BBC during that time left right before the scandal came to light to become the current CEO of The New York Times [3]
There are many other examples but these are recent and well documented.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...
2. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abc-news-amy-robach-jeffrey-e...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/jimmy-...