Tea at Trianon: The Netflix 'New Yorker at 100’ Doc Omits Russiagate, Kavanaugh Debacles

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

The Netflix 'New Yorker at 100’ Doc Omits Russiagate, Kavanaugh Debacles

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

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.” (Read more.)