Welcome to the New Yorker

Welcome to the New Yorker, Rapples, has to evolve, and free court, marriage, Belmo, Wants, Sieford, Mass of People, Mass of People, Bork. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Every so often, maybe once a week, the cartoonist Leanna Fink, leaves the house early and buys a ticket for the Long Island Railroad. That's a commuter line that goes out of New York, but Leon is not actually

commuting. She's not going anywhere. She just likes riding the train. She likes the hubbub. She likes to be

around people without getting sucked into conversation. I like to come up with New Yorker

cartoons on the train.

I can't stand when people talk to me when I'm working, but I love when they talk to each other.

A ride to exactly nowhere with Leanna Fink later this hour.

But we're going to start with a ride of a very different kind, bracing and exciting for some and, frankly,

terrifying for others, the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

Donald Trump campaigned to bring change to the way things are done in Washington, and he's brought it, unquestionably, and with his team dealing in alternative facts or falsehoods or lies, call it what you will,

our job of telling you the truth, the job of journalists, as best we can figure out, is harder than it's ever been.

Recently, there was more news about the infamous Russian dossier, the unverified documents,

alleging salacious and very damning activities by the man who's now president.

And nearly all of what we know about the dossier came from its publication online in BuzzFeed.

Now BuzzFeed, if you're not familiar with it, is a website that mixes a lot of things, quizzes, videos, listicles, all kinds of clickbait,

alongside some very serious and very thorough reporting.

Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief,

and he made the controversial decision to publish the entire dossier on BuzzFeed

with a disclaimer telling you, the reader,

to make up your own mind whether to believe it or not.

Ben, I thought what we would do is before we get into a back and forth about whether it was the right thing to do

or the wrong thing to do to publish this dossier, I want to know the narrative of what happened.

...