| In the final weeks of 1936, a historic scandal entranced the British public. Was King Edward VIII about to do the unthinkable, abandoning the throne to marry a commoner named Wallis Simpson—a divorcée and an American, no less? In the U.S., fascination with the story appeared just as insatiable. But for media outlets in both countries, there was a problem: almost no one outside the Royal Family truly knew what was going on. The dearth of information left newspapers in an awkward position, The New Yorker’s Robert Benchley observed, from this side of the Pond. They had “nothing to print and everywhere to print it.” Still, when it comes to the Windsors, where there’s a will, there’s a way. In the magazine’s Wayward Press column—a media-criticism feature that started as equal parts snark and insight—Benchley catalogued the strategies that American papers were using to fill pages. It’s a quandary that editors and royals have faced many times since—no news, lots of interest—sometimes with disastrous results. It’s also a scenario likely to emerge in the just-released final season of “The Crown,” the Netflix series that drew so much of its early drama from the fallout over Edward’s abdication. In Benchley’s column nearly nine decades ago, the writer cast a skeptical eye on a purported conversation between the King and the British Prime Minister, as rendered in the News. The “vivid stenographic report” appeared so precise, the writer surmised suspiciously, that the paper’s “reliable source” must have been eavesdropping from under a table. | 
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