NBC News has demonstrated repeatedly in recent days that no allegation of sexual misconduct is too absurd or dubious to get immediate wall-to-wall coverage from its biggest and best-paid personalities. The total collapse of the network's editorial standards in pursuit of damning information about Kavanaugh is telling, considering that not long ago NBC set up major hurdles for the former reporter who eventually exposed Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein as a real-life serial sexual predator.

On Monday, NBC aired a one-on-one interview between Kate Snow and a woman who claims she witnessed Kavanaugh participating in gang rapes when he was roughly 15-years-old.

The Kavanaugh accuser, Julie Swetnick, said in an affidavit she “witnessed Brett Kavanaugh consistently engage in excessive drinking and inappropriate contact of a sexual nature with women during the early 1980s." She also said in her affidavit she witnessed attempts by Kavanaugh to get girls "inebriated and disoriented so they could then be 'gang raped' in a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys." Swetnick also said, “I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.”

Worst of all, Swetnick claims she "became the victim of one of these 'gang' or 'train' rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.” She concludes her affidavit by claiming there are “other witnesses that can attest to the truthfulness of each of the statements above.”

Swetnick, who is being represented by celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti, has yet to produce a single witness to corroborate a story that implicates literally dozens of individuals and should have, if true, produced multiple witnesses and victims. She also suffers from psychological problems, as it turns out, and Avenatti has recently admitted that Swetnick didn't actually witness Kavanaugh's alleged criminal behavior firsthand.

So naturally, NBC News gave her a plum spot in its evening prime-time lineup this week to repeat her unverified charges against the embattled Supreme Court nominee.

If you can believe it, Kate Snow began her Swetnick interview with a word of caution: “NBC News, for the record, has not been able to independently verify her claims. There are things she told us on camera that differ from her written statements last week."

An example of one of these differences would be Swetnick alleging in the affidavit that she witnessed Kavanaugh “spik[ing] the drinks of girls at house parties ... with grain alcohol and/or drugs” versus her alleging in her NBC interview she only saw Kavanaugh handing out red Solo cups to girls.

Kavanaugh, for his part, has denied the allegations entirely, telling Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”

Snow also said at the end of her Swetnick interview, “This morning, Swetnick provided four names of friends she says went to the parties with him. One of them says he does not recall a Julie Swetnick. Another of the friends she named is deceased. We reached out to the other two and haven’t heard back. Swetnick says after the alleged attack on her when she was 19, she never returned to those big house parties.”

There is no version of reality where the decision to air this interview conforms to journalistic ethics.

National Public Radio’s ethics handbook states simply that, “We should never be in the position of looking for corroboration after a report has been published or broadcast.” The Society of Professional Journalists also states in its code of ethics that journalists should “verify information before releasing it.” The New York Times’ Jessica Bennett, who reported sexual allegations leveled against playwright Israel Horovitz, explained at the time of her reporting that “each woman also had to be corroborated by at least two other sources.”

In this context, NBC's decision to air the Swetnick interview despite the lack of corroborating information tells you a lot about how the network is handling the Kavanaugh confirmation fight.

While watching NBC’s this train wreck of an interview, and pondering what editorial standards were trampled in its single-minded pursuit of tanking Kavanaugh's nomination, I couldn’t help but remember all the difficulties one of its former reporters, Ronan Farrow, encountered from network executives when he set out to uncover Harvey Weinstein’s well-corroborated history of sexual abuse.

I couldn’t help but remember that NBC executives allegedly argued Farrow’s story wasn’t ready for prime time, even though he had obtained a secret audio recording of Weinstein himself admitting to sexually assaulting a woman. Farrow later shopped his story to the New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer for it.

It’s funny how NBC’s standards have changed, and for whom. The fact that Kavanaugh is a conservative judge who might just turn the Supreme Court, and Weinstein is a major Democratic donor with deep ties to NBC Universal, couldn't have anything to do with it. Could it?