Noah Oppenheim is an American television producer, author, and screenwriter. He became president of NBC News in 2017 and is known for attempting to stop Ronan Farrow's reporting on the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases. Previously, Oppenheim was the executive in charge and senior producer of NBC's Today Show, where he supervised the 7–8am hour of the broadcast, and head of development at the production company Reveille.
Oppenheim co-created CNBC's Mad Money with Jim Cramer, was executive producer of Scarborough Country, and senior producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews. In 2003, as executive producer at MSNBC, Oppenheim was sent to Baghdad to assess whether the negative media coverage of the Iraq War was justified, and published what was later described as "a devastating critique on the behavior and practices of reporters from the mainstream outlets" there. In January 2015 Oppenheim was appointed a senior vice president and given control of the Today Show; he had worked as a senior producer for the show from 2005 until 2008.
Oppenheim was made president of NBC News in February 2017. During his tenure as president of NBC News, articles and opinion pieces Oppenheim wrote while attending Harvard resurface, which raised concerns about the culture Oppenheim is cultivating at NBC and whether it is accommodating to female employees. He has been accused of self-dealing by repeatedly promoting children's books co-authored by his wife on the Today Show.
In 2017, it was Oppenheim's idea to put Ronan Farrow on the story about the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations, which were credited with starting the Me Too movement; NBC News ultimately, however, failed to publish it, a decision Farrow blamed on Oppenheim. Farrow took the story to The New Yorker which published it soon afterwards. The NBC News organization and Oppenheim were criticized for not publishing the Weinstein story, criticism that intensified when news broke of the sexual harassment claims against Matt Lauer. Ronan Farrow later said that Oppenheim played a major role in refusing to allow NBC News to report on those allegations in 2017. Oppenheim denied Farrow's claim and said that the reason NBC News chose not to report on the story was that the available evidence did not meet their journalistic standards. However, other accounts of contemporary discussions within NBC News are consistent with Oppenheim preventing NBC journalists from reporting on Weinstein. Oppenheim denied that NBC hid the Matt Lauer accusations over the years and calls Farrow's book a "smear" though many on his staff remain skeptical. Farrow also reported that NBC News hired a "Wikipedia whitewasher" who removed references to NBC's role in the Weinstein case from several Wikipedia articles, including Oppenheim's.
