The New Yorker at 100, a new documentary airing on Netflix, has a lot going for it. The impressive history of the legendary magazine, going back to the 1920s, is recounted, and great contemporary writers, like music critic Kelefa Sanneh, are interviewed.
Where it falls down is in avoiding the New Yorker’s worst mistakes, namely falling for Russiagate and perpetuating the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco.
It’s a shame, because The New Yorker at 100 does cop to serious mistakes - most obviously, the fact, revealed years later, that parts of Truman Capote’s 1965 crime story In Cold Blood were made up. One editor even admits that they are elitists. Yet the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, won’t face the two biggest blunders in recent years.
In the March 12, 2018 New Yorker, writer Jane Mayer published an exclusive piece: “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier.” It was a profile of Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had produced a dossier claiming that Trump had been involved with Russian prostitutes and that the Kremlin was using the information to blackmail the president. In the years since the dossier story has collapsed. Many journalist,s including Matt Taibbi, challenged Mayer’s reporting. With more and more revelations turning up about it every week, it’s now accepted by all sane people that Hillary Clinton set the entire thing up, and the charges are nonsense. It was a hoax.
Ronan Farrow is also featured in The New Yorker at 100. Farrow’s New Yorker coverage was called into question in 2020 by Ben Smith, a media reporter at the New York Times. According to Smith, “if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in the New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, you start to see some shakiness at its foundation.” Farrow, noted Smith, “delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.”
Smith offers examples of Farrow not talking to key witnesses in sexual harassment cases, subjectively interpreting events and ignoring key facts. Smith then made this conclusion:
Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.
In “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records,” Farrow suggested something suspicious inside the Treasury Department. An FBI employee had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, had vanished from a government database in 2018. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to warn the public about Cohen’s financial activities. Congressional Democrats and the media went crazy. Rachel Maddow called the story “a meteor strike,” and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.
Yet as Ben Smith writes, “two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents.” The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went missing. That was just the claim by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry. Fry had leaked the information after seeing a tweet by Michael Avenatti, the disgraced attorney and extortionist who is now in prison. In May 2018, Avenatti went on Twitter and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records. Fry, as Smith described him, was “a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco [and] one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts.” Then this: “Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January.”
When asked about this and other problems with Farrow’s reporting, Smith got double-talk. “The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know,” Smith wrote. “Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.”
In September 2018, I myself got a call from Ronan Farrow. A woman had accused Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine, of sexual assault at a party in 1982. Ford claimed I was in the room when the assault took place. At the time, Farrow informed me that I was mentioned in the letter and that the charge had to do with “sexual misconduct in the 1980s.” When I asked who the accuser was or where the attack allegedly took place, Farrow told me he couldn’t tell me. He then announced that it took place “sometime in the 1980s.”
As I have noted on Hot Air previously, I’m aware that I have written about this topic a lot in recent years, including my book The Devil’s Triangle. I do so not to “make it all about me,” as some trolls have claimed, but to stay vigilant when the left tries to re-establish the bogus Kavanaugh narrative that I have derailed. The New York at 100 is another such attempt by the media to avoid owning up to what they did.
I still find myself incredulous at Farrow’s deviousness. I was being asked about something that had happened “in the 1980s” - the entire decade. As John McCormick wrote at the time in The Weekly Standard: “Judge says he first learned he was named in the letter during an interview with the New Yorker….The Kavanaugh classmate told TWS that the New Yorker did not provide him the name of the woman alleging wrongdoing, a specific date of the alleged incident, or the location where the incident is alleged to have occurred.” Blogger Allahpundit put it this way: “Judge apparently found out he was named in the letter when Ronan Farrow called to ask about it. Farrow offered no details about when the incident supposedly happened or where, or even the name of the woman. Judge has been accused of participating in an attempted rape with a would-be Supreme Court justice, in other words, and can’t even get the basic facts of the allegation provided to him. It’s Kafkaesque.”
In May of 2018, Farrow had dined with Michael Avenatti. A week after the Blasey Ford accusation in September, a woman represented by Avenatti, would accuse Brett and me of being present at ten high school parties where girls were gang raped. The woman also claimed that she herself had been raped at one of these parties.
I recently reached out to Jane Mayer to ask her about this disaster. “The New Yorker was not among the news organizations that published Avenatti’s allegation against Kavanaugh,” Mayer told me. “We were unconvinced of its veracity then, and I remain so today.”
Mayer did, however, publish a story quoting an old college girlfriend of mine, who claimed I was once involved in a group sex situation. The girlfriend said I had talked about this during a conversation where we discussed how we lost our virginity. As is always the case with the media, the truth arrives months after the salacious lies. In her 2022 book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court, Los Angeles Times reporter Jackie Calmes actually tried to verify the Avenatti claims. The woman had claimed that she herself had been raped, and that she had reported the crime to the police. Towards the end of Dissent, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the police report:
County officials never did search for any police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through three thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when the woman, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.
So I’m gang banging and drugging girls when I’m 14 in 1980. And nobody in the media, not even Ronan Farrow at the legendary New Yorker, would pay a grand to find the police report. The truth of the lies was buried 300 pages into a book published five years after the fact. If only The New Yorker still had the shame it did when it was revealed that much of In Cold Blood was not true. Still, the music reviews are good.
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