The magazine faced questions from conservative and mainstream outlets about the lack of corroborating eye-witnesses to support a new claim about Kavanaugh's college behavior.
© Ben Gabbe/Getty ImagesTV interviewers pressed Ronan Farrow (pictured) and Jane Mayer, the authors of the New Yorker report with new allegations about Brett Kavanaugh.
The New Yorker faced tough questions Monday about its report detailing a new set of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, as conservatives used criticisms of the magazine's story to dismiss the latest turmoil surrounding Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination.
Throughout Monday, TV interviewers pressed Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, the authors of the
piece, on the Sunday night story's disclosure that the accuser, Deborah Ramirez,
acknowledged holes in her memory of a dorm party she said occurred in Kavanaugh's freshman year at Yale.
The pair also faced questions over their
lack of corroborating eye-witnesses to support Ramirez's recollection that Kavanaugh "thrust his penis in her face and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away," though the story cited a classmate of Ramirez's who said he heard about the incident shortly after it occurred and several others who attested to her character.
On ABC's
Good Morning America on Monday morning, Farrow said, "We wouldn't have run this if we didn't have a careful basis of people who had heard at the time and found her credible."
Host George Stephanopoulos replied: "But by your own admission, no eye witnesses of the incident."
Farrow said that was true but added that Ramirez considered her account carefully before going on the record. "This is not the behavior of someone who is fabricating something," he said. Pressed on why it took her six days to take stock of her memories, Farrow replied that, in his experience reporting on women accusing men of abuse, "that's extremely typical of these stories."
While most in the mainstream press appeared satisfied with those sort of answers, conservatives across media and politics went on the attack against
The New Yorker. Last week, Kavanaugh's backers were careful not to appear to bash a possible assault victim in Christine Blasey Ford. But
The New Yorker is a far less fraught target. Right-leaning media and GOP politicians seized on Farrow and Mayer's "show your work" approach - including quoting
classmates who disputed Ramirez's account of the party - to bolster their argument that the new allegations were part of an anti-Kavanaugh "smear" campaign.
A highly placed
story on the Fox News website titled, "'LAZY AT BEST': Mag's flimsy reporting on Kavanaugh accuser has critics howling," called the
New Yorker report "sketchy" and quoted several people - mostly conservatives - from Twitter who agreed.
In another example, The
National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke
wrote that he was "struggling to remember reading a less responsible piece of 'journalism' in a major outlet."
Breitbart,
The Daily Wire and
The Daily Caller all weighed in too.
Responding to questions from POLITICO,
New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick said in a statement that the magazine's story was "completely transparent" about the questions it could not answer.
"Moreover, the story is painstakingly fair, including publishing lengthy statements from Judge Kavanaugh and the White House, as well as speaking to sources who attest to Ms. Ramirez's credibility," he said. "Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow and their editors and fact-checker did their work with care. And as the story develops, I wouldn't doubt that they will follow where the facts and events take them."
Remnick also said that the fact that senators on the Judiciary Committee are looking into Ramirez's story made it newsworthy.
Several critics of the
New Yorker story focused on a paragraph in a Sunday
New York Times report, which read: "The
Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and
could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and
told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself."The Gateway Pundit's main
headline for much of Monday read, "
NY Times, ABC News, Throw Shade on
New Yorker Kavanaugh Hit Piece," even though neither outlet was directly critical of the
New Yorker's work. And The Daily Caller ran a headline Monday saying: "Even The
NYT Wasn't Buying Kavanaugh's New Accuser's Story."
Unlike The
New Yorker, though - as Farrow pointed out
on Twitter - The Times was not able to interview Ramirez on the record.
In a
statement to
The Washington Post's Erik Wemple,
Times executive editor Dean Baquet said, "I gather some people thought we were trying to knock down her account, but that's not what we were doing. I'm not questioning their story. We've been competing against Ronan Farrow for a year and he's terrific."
Breaking digital stories is a relatively new endeavor for
The New Yorker, which has in the last year started to post investigative reports online more frequently, in the middle of news cycles, rather than waiting for the print edition of the magazine.
Remnick said that the magazine, renowned for its authoritative accounts and rigorous fact-checking, uses the same standards for any story, regardless of whether it ever appears in print.
"The approach is always the same: deep reporting, careful editing and fact-checking, thorough discussion of all the issues and ramifications," he said. "Technology changes but our attempt to get at the truth, with depth and care, is the same."
Comment: Comments on The New Yorker's grossly irresponsible story