16 ms·

A reporter’s fight to expose Epstein’s crimes, and earn a living

133 points by dsr12 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/4BSlw https://archive.is/4BSlw
tunesmith 5y ago
It seems like there's a centralization mismatch - the revenue model of journalism has centralized, while regional corruption hasn't. So unless centralized journalism starts to demonstrate a real ability to quickly allocate resources to local school boards, city councils, etc, there's a real arbitrage opportunity for your garden-variety local corrupt official to get away with shenanigans without much of a check on their power.
gameswithgo 5y ago
maybe this reporter at the nyt can talk to the one who doxxed a blogger/journalist ruining his employment
daenz 5y ago
Isn't it disturbing how we all just sort of stopped hearing about the Epstein case? Doesn't that reveal the stranglehold of censorship that powerful people have on the media, when there is a clear risk to their financial interests and reputations? The story should have been headlining for a year as every sordid fact was uncovered, but people seem to have largely forgotten about it. Everyone seemed to be aligned against this person and what they did, but somehow the media didn't care much to dig into the details. I doubt your average person could mention more than a couple of high profile people that Epstein rubbed shoulders with (Likely "Trump" and "Bill Clinton").
- hasbot 5y ago
  Him becoming dead might have something to do with it.
- bcraven 5y ago
  You presumably stopped hearing about it as he was arrested and then died. You can't prosecute a dead man, and there's no closure for the victims.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I'm guessing he had tons of tape on people who didn't like that one bit, hence the "suicide." I was hoping to see something come of that, at the very least a conviction for his sidekick Ghislaine.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  The whispers are that Epstein was in "intelligence" (CIA/Mossad/etc). I assume those organizations can silence investigative journalism that would expose their inner workings.
  - adambatkin 5y ago
    Those whispers must be pretty quiet. Do you have any sources for this?
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      These whispers have been around for decades in certain circles, even before the weird Florida non-prosecution. The singularly most public, appropriately caveated, responsible discussion of this comes through Eric Weinstein, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffrey-epstein/id1469999563?i=1000467924050 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffr...
    - 6nf 5y ago
      When Epstein was convicted the first time, in 2008, the prosecutor got told to let him go because he was a CIA asset. He got a deal that included only a few months in jail.
    - shrubble 5y ago
      Alex Acosta told the Trump transition team that interviewed him that Epstein was 'intelligence' see: https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligence-work/ https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligenc... and many other sources besides. Former Attorney General Bill Barr's father was involved in the Dalton School. (Edit: he was headmaster of Dalton School from 1964 to 1974). Barr's father previously got Epstein a job teaching at the Dalton School. Barr's father also wrote a creepy novel called Space Relations that involves a subplot of an enslaved teenager used to breed more slaves; there are other odd sexually charged subplots involving underaged girls as well. Epstein discussed with others the idea of breeding many women... the coincidences sure seem odd, at the least.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  It's a very difficult story to report on because 1) the people who own your institution may be involved on some level, 2) all legitimate sources of novel material information will have been destroyed, 3) interviews are worthless because everybody who we know about who would have anything interesting to say are also both implicated and endangered, and there are so many kooks claiming to know things that it would be impossible to sort them out of the people who we don't know about. It's bizarre that we even think that this story would have an outcome. A number of the completely arbitrary people we shower laurels on under crony capitalism like to have sex with runaway/endangered teenagers under completely safe and shielded circumstances. They disguised payment by parking money in a fake (investment fund/tax advisory structure/real estate partnership) with a guy who spent his entire life procuring for and protecting them. He probably kept blackmail material that got him out of the first prosecution, and lost control of that blackmail material before the next prosecution. Clinton's sanctions on Iraq killed a half million children. That's more important than the fact that he may have abused teenagers on a sex plane/island, and he still speaks at the Democratic convention. We know that he manipulated a young intern into sex while on the job, and suspect he may be a serial sex abuser/rapist, and we try to make his wife president. We all know about "pussy-grabbing" Trump. We need to get over the delusion that sunlight solves problems. Sunlight often makes problems seem commonplace and therefore unimportant. There would be nothing to expect out of a full exposure of Epstein and his network of associates other than a few old men going to jail, and being replaced by people just as bad. It's just something we desire out of prurient interest. If we're really interested, we create social and political structures that either limit the ability of the wealthy to operate with impunity (a pointless effort IMO, because money is power), or limit the ability to become that wealthy. This is assuming we think that one of the purposes of government is to defend the weak from the strong. Maybe we don't care about that, and abused teens are just another cost to maintain a desirable status quo, like half a million Iraqi children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8
1024core 5y ago
I wouldn't mind paying for quality journalism, and thus support journalists like Ms Brown. However, a digital subscription to (say) the NYT costs $4.75/week (regular rate), whereas print version costs $10. I can't share it with my family member. It costs so much more to actually deliver a physical newspaper, and printing it costs so much more. With the digital version, I can get targeted advertising, unlike the shotgun approach of print. So why does digital cost so much? Unlike print, I am able to access digital versions of almost any newspaper out there effortlessly. This makes it much easier to browse around and cherry-pick stories from different sources. Having to pay individually for every source is untenable. Why doesn't the newspaper industry work with companies like Google and Facebook to come up with a workable system that rewards journalists appropriately, without gouging readers? For example, I'd be willing to pay, say, $100/year for full access to every (major) newspaper out there. Let Google track my reading and then at the end of the year, divide up this $100 proportionally to the consumption at each of the sources.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  What happens to that model when someone starts reporting at Google, FB, NYT, Wash Post, etc. is tracking your every scroll and click? And does this biz model actually promote higher quality journalism? Anecdotally, it doesn't look that way. I'm not sure what the solution is but giving more powerful to the powerful is not a sustainable route to fixing The Fourth Estate.
- throwaway98797 5y ago
  Like this? https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
  - 1024core 5y ago
    Except that I'm not in the Apple walled garden. No Apple devices here.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > It costs so much more to actually deliver a physical newspaper, and printing it costs so much more. [Compared to a digital newspaper distributed over the internet.] It is not obvious that either of these claims is true. What do you think the marginal cost of one printing is? One delivery? Mail delivery is quite literally the paradigm example of something that is expensive if you do it once but essentially free at scale.
ummonk 5y ago
I wish there were a way for me to pay directly for original reporting like this without having to pay for editorials.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's fair to say that the opinion pages are one of the cheaper aspects associated with a newspaper.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    That might be the case, but newspapers seem to devote an enormous amount of space to opinion. It's especially stark compared to my favored medium for local news: local news channels - which incidentally tend to be profitable.
    - awb 5y ago
      I don’t know the economics but I wouldn’t be surprised if OpEd pieces are low cost or free to produce. They’re basically advertising for the author and their ideas.
      - akimball 5y ago
        Yet if I want to read the journalistic content of the Wall Street Journal, I have to pay them to put out noxious seditious propaganda and disinformation. No can do.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
The problem here is we are being asked to "defend democracy and truth" by funding one or two decent journalists who will dig up the truth, and with one front page story solve all our problems. We are just outsourcing the hard work. Defending truth and justice (whatever that means) is something we pay a fortune for in our taxes, police, judges, prisons, mental health and drug addiction clinics - all of this is supposed to spot the criminals in our society and stop them. I think we need to consider why some people get away with certain crimes, and build the institutions to stop that - it please journalist will stumble on the story
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I agree with your reasoning, but i strongly disagree with the core assumption that more power structures can solve the issues, as i believe they are the source of most problems you are pointing to. People being in positions of privilege and power is precisely why they can get away with certain crimes. The institutions to build to stop that cannot be centralized like social-democracy advocates, but have to be fully democratic, as in run directly by the people and for the people. Electing our next masters every 4 years (5 where i'm from) is not democracy. Democracy is about seizing power, not about giving it away to soulless sociopaths. If you believe democracy is a term that's been emptied out of meaning, i'd recommend reading some anarchist literature as another take on what democracy can (should?) look like.
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    Yes - I wanted to put something else in there - something about having institutions that can be trusted. In the UK the Police and criminal evidence act (PACE) dramatically changed policing. The old "sweeney" style of policing (brutality and lying in court) was threatened - everyone thought riminals would walk away unless cops could lie to get the conviction they needed - and the cops got better - improved evidence gathering, improved processes and basically raised their game. It's far from perfect - everything from institutional racism to under-staffing - but the institution proved capable of reform. (Admittedly the UK justice system is freaking as years of massive under-fu ding are coming home to roost but that's a different problem - similar to the defund movement in the US) I don't like solutions that say "the people shall watch carefully" because people have other things to do. Unless a guard is paid full time to guard, they start to take their eyes off the ball. But full time paid guards tend to like the people paying them, regulatory capture etc. Having competing guards (regulators) is an interesting idea but that might upset people who don't like paying for one set of guards. In short, it's a hard problem and while democracy as in the will of "all the people" is the well-spring, we cannot expect all the people to pay attention all of the time. We have to pay some of the people all of the time to pay attention - the problem is who guard the guards recursively . Edit: Epstein's crimes were also a peculiar kind - let's say that there are many crimes he could have committed that would have been socially repulsive, and had him reported and ostracised far more quickly than being a rich old man predating on young women. It's on us to change how acceptable that was / is. Edit: it's worth noting i did not think of this straight off - that cultural change is long time coming
CheezeIt 5y ago
> Berman revealed little about what went on inside his office, but said that his team was helped by “some excellent investigative journalism.” He was clearly referring to Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald series “Perversion of Justice.” Well, this is a facile lie, unsurprising from the New York Times, because before Brown, there was Alan Dershowitz and Mike Cernovich (another journalist) suing to unseal documents, and then Brown joined the party. But that would undermine their morality play about newspapers and their funding.
- fttx_ 5y ago
  This seems dubious to me. Dershowitz appears to be deeply personally implicated in Epstein’s crimes. Brown has been investigating Epstein since early 2017. I can’t see any evidence of Cernovich being involved that early. Do you have any? In fact, Cernovich and Dershowitz working together and “suing to unseal documents” looks like it’s that started in 2019, and while Dershowitz clearly has personal reasons for his involvement it looks like Cernovich’s involvement is in fact directly in response to Brown’s reporting.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    https://s9503.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Epstein-case-unseal-cernovich.pdf https://s9503.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Epstein-cas... “On January 19, 2017, Cernovich, an independent blogger and self‐described “popular political journalist,” moved to intervene, seeking to unseal the summary judgment record, and Dershowitz joined his motion.”
imgabe 5y ago
It’s bonkers to me that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is a joke. Like here’s a known pedophile and sex trafficker connected to almost every powerful person in the world who was very very very obviously murdered to prevent him from testifying about something and the reaction of the mainstream media is “haha, that’s weird, anyway…”
- derbOac 5y ago
  My strong impression over the last couple of decades is for journalists to take many things at face value and defer to "experts" without digging into things like potential conflicts of interests or motives etc. So if you have a set of experts saying "Epstein killed himself," even if those experts have conflicts of interest and/or were appointed by those with CoI, a lot of journalists will defer. I think a similar phenomenon was in play with the lab leak hypothesis, various things related to Erdogan in Turkey, Russian assassinations in the UK, reporting over the Mueller Report, and a host of other things. I don't think all journalists are like this, and I understand where they're coming from, but increasingly reading between the lines and/or interpreting stated conclusions in the context of human motives seems lost on a lot of journalists and/or journalism outlets. It leads to these weird situations where something is very obviously off about a situation but you can't get someone to say something on the record, so things are just shrugged off, taken at face value, and you're led to doubt your own logic. Often but not always eventually journalists can get someone to say something on the record, and then it's treated like some big revelation. Journalists getting intelligence experts to acknowledge "no it's not really likely someone could kill themselves and then afterwards stuff themselves into a black body bag and zip it up." Then everyone is like "oh ok I wasn't losing my sanity" and there's some correction. But sometimes it's just left to historians to pick up the threads. I'm not saying anything about Epstein or anything in particular, and there's a need to avoid going down conspiracy rabbit holes. But I wish there was more nuance in coverage sometimes, to acknowledge that something weird or shady is going on while acknowledging there's no evidence for anything in particular.
  - golemotron 5y ago
    > My strong impression over the last couple of decades is for journalists to take many things at face value and defer to "experts" without digging into things like potential conflicts of interests or motives etc. A lot of it is the fact that there's no money in journalism, never mind investigative journalism. It's cheaper to have people write stories based on their imaginations or their readings of Twitter.

133 points by dsr12 5y ago

https://archive.is/4BSlw https://archive.is/4BSlw

It seems like there's a centralization mismatch - the revenue model of journalism has centralized, while regional corruption hasn't. So unless centralized journalism starts to demonstrate a real ability to quickly allocate resources to local school boards, city councils, etc, there's a real arbitrage opportunity for your garden-variety local corrupt official to get away with shenanigans without much of a check on their power.

gameswithgo 5y ago

maybe this reporter at the nyt can talk to the one who doxxed a blogger/journalist ruining his employment

daenz 5y ago

Isn't it disturbing how we all just sort of stopped hearing about the Epstein case? Doesn't that reveal the stranglehold of censorship that powerful people have on the media, when there is a clear risk to their financial interests and reputations? The story should have been headlining for a year as every sordid fact was uncovered, but people seem to have largely forgotten about it. Everyone seemed to be aligned against this person and what they did, but somehow the media didn't care much to dig into the details. I doubt your average person could mention more than a couple of high profile people that Epstein rubbed shoulders with (Likely "Trump" and "Bill Clinton").

hasbot 5y ago
Him becoming dead might have something to do with it.
bcraven 5y ago
You presumably stopped hearing about it as he was arrested and then died. You can't prosecute a dead man, and there's no closure for the victims.
- foobarian 5y ago
  I'm guessing he had tons of tape on people who didn't like that one bit, hence the "suicide." I was hoping to see something come of that, at the very least a conviction for his sidekick Ghislaine.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The whispers are that Epstein was in "intelligence" (CIA/Mossad/etc). I assume those organizations can silence investigative journalism that would expose their inner workings.
- adambatkin 5y ago
  Those whispers must be pretty quiet. Do you have any sources for this?
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    These whispers have been around for decades in certain circles, even before the weird Florida non-prosecution. The singularly most public, appropriately caveated, responsible discussion of this comes through Eric Weinstein, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffrey-epstein/id1469999563?i=1000467924050 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffr...
  - 6nf 5y ago
    When Epstein was convicted the first time, in 2008, the prosecutor got told to let him go because he was a CIA asset. He got a deal that included only a few months in jail.
  - shrubble 5y ago
    Alex Acosta told the Trump transition team that interviewed him that Epstein was 'intelligence' see: https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligence-work/ https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligenc... and many other sources besides. Former Attorney General Bill Barr's father was involved in the Dalton School. (Edit: he was headmaster of Dalton School from 1964 to 1974). Barr's father previously got Epstein a job teaching at the Dalton School. Barr's father also wrote a creepy novel called Space Relations that involves a subplot of an enslaved teenager used to breed more slaves; there are other odd sexually charged subplots involving underaged girls as well. Epstein discussed with others the idea of breeding many women... the coincidences sure seem odd, at the least.
pessimizer 5y ago
It's a very difficult story to report on because 1) the people who own your institution may be involved on some level, 2) all legitimate sources of novel material information will have been destroyed, 3) interviews are worthless because everybody who we know about who would have anything interesting to say are also both implicated and endangered, and there are so many kooks claiming to know things that it would be impossible to sort them out of the people who we don't know about. It's bizarre that we even think that this story would have an outcome. A number of the completely arbitrary people we shower laurels on under crony capitalism like to have sex with runaway/endangered teenagers under completely safe and shielded circumstances. They disguised payment by parking money in a fake (investment fund/tax advisory structure/real estate partnership) with a guy who spent his entire life procuring for and protecting them. He probably kept blackmail material that got him out of the first prosecution, and lost control of that blackmail material before the next prosecution. Clinton's sanctions on Iraq killed a half million children. That's more important than the fact that he may have abused teenagers on a sex plane/island, and he still speaks at the Democratic convention. We know that he manipulated a young intern into sex while on the job, and suspect he may be a serial sex abuser/rapist, and we try to make his wife president. We all know about "pussy-grabbing" Trump. We need to get over the delusion that sunlight solves problems. Sunlight often makes problems seem commonplace and therefore unimportant. There would be nothing to expect out of a full exposure of Epstein and his network of associates other than a few old men going to jail, and being replaced by people just as bad. It's just something we desire out of prurient interest. If we're really interested, we create social and political structures that either limit the ability of the wealthy to operate with impunity (a pointless effort IMO, because money is power), or limit the ability to become that wealthy. This is assuming we think that one of the purposes of government is to defend the weak from the strong. Maybe we don't care about that, and abused teens are just another cost to maintain a desirable status quo, like half a million Iraqi children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8

1024core 5y ago

I wouldn't mind paying for quality journalism, and thus support journalists like Ms Brown. However, a digital subscription to (say) the NYT costs $4.75/week (regular rate), whereas print version costs $10. I can't share it with my family member. It costs so much more to actually deliver a physical newspaper, and printing it costs so much more. With the digital version, I can get targeted advertising, unlike the shotgun approach of print. So why does digital cost so much? Unlike print, I am able to access digital versions of almost any newspaper out there effortlessly. This makes it much easier to browse around and cherry-pick stories from different sources. Having to pay individually for every source is untenable. Why doesn't the newspaper industry work with companies like Google and Facebook to come up with a workable system that rewards journalists appropriately, without gouging readers? For example, I'd be willing to pay, say, $100/year for full access to every (major) newspaper out there. Let Google track my reading and then at the end of the year, divide up this $100 proportionally to the consumption at each of the sources.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
What happens to that model when someone starts reporting at Google, FB, NYT, Wash Post, etc. is tracking your every scroll and click? And does this biz model actually promote higher quality journalism? Anecdotally, it doesn't look that way. I'm not sure what the solution is but giving more powerful to the powerful is not a sustainable route to fixing The Fourth Estate.
throwaway98797 5y ago
Like this? https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
- 1024core 5y ago
  Except that I'm not in the Apple walled garden. No Apple devices here.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> It costs so much more to actually deliver a physical newspaper, and printing it costs so much more. [Compared to a digital newspaper distributed over the internet.] It is not obvious that either of these claims is true. What do you think the marginal cost of one printing is? One delivery? Mail delivery is quite literally the paradigm example of something that is expensive if you do it once but essentially free at scale.

ummonk 5y ago

I wish there were a way for me to pay directly for original reporting like this without having to pay for editorials.

ghaff 5y ago
I'm pretty sure it's fair to say that the opinion pages are one of the cheaper aspects associated with a newspaper.
- ummonk 5y ago
  That might be the case, but newspapers seem to devote an enormous amount of space to opinion. It's especially stark compared to my favored medium for local news: local news channels - which incidentally tend to be profitable.
  - awb 5y ago
    I don’t know the economics but I wouldn’t be surprised if OpEd pieces are low cost or free to produce. They’re basically advertising for the author and their ideas.
    - akimball 5y ago
      Yet if I want to read the journalistic content of the Wall Street Journal, I have to pay them to put out noxious seditious propaganda and disinformation. No can do.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

The problem here is we are being asked to "defend democracy and truth" by funding one or two decent journalists who will dig up the truth, and with one front page story solve all our problems. We are just outsourcing the hard work. Defending truth and justice (whatever that means) is something we pay a fortune for in our taxes, police, judges, prisons, mental health and drug addiction clinics - all of this is supposed to spot the criminals in our society and stop them. I think we need to consider why some people get away with certain crimes, and build the institutions to stop that - it please journalist will stumble on the story

southerntofu 5y ago
I agree with your reasoning, but i strongly disagree with the core assumption that more power structures can solve the issues, as i believe they are the source of most problems you are pointing to. People being in positions of privilege and power is precisely why they can get away with certain crimes. The institutions to build to stop that cannot be centralized like social-democracy advocates, but have to be fully democratic, as in run directly by the people and for the people. Electing our next masters every 4 years (5 where i'm from) is not democracy. Democracy is about seizing power, not about giving it away to soulless sociopaths. If you believe democracy is a term that's been emptied out of meaning, i'd recommend reading some anarchist literature as another take on what democracy can (should?) look like.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Yes - I wanted to put something else in there - something about having institutions that can be trusted. In the UK the Police and criminal evidence act (PACE) dramatically changed policing. The old "sweeney" style of policing (brutality and lying in court) was threatened - everyone thought riminals would walk away unless cops could lie to get the conviction they needed - and the cops got better - improved evidence gathering, improved processes and basically raised their game. It's far from perfect - everything from institutional racism to under-staffing - but the institution proved capable of reform. (Admittedly the UK justice system is freaking as years of massive under-fu ding are coming home to roost but that's a different problem - similar to the defund movement in the US) I don't like solutions that say "the people shall watch carefully" because people have other things to do. Unless a guard is paid full time to guard, they start to take their eyes off the ball. But full time paid guards tend to like the people paying them, regulatory capture etc. Having competing guards (regulators) is an interesting idea but that might upset people who don't like paying for one set of guards. In short, it's a hard problem and while democracy as in the will of "all the people" is the well-spring, we cannot expect all the people to pay attention all of the time. We have to pay some of the people all of the time to pay attention - the problem is who guard the guards recursively . Edit: Epstein's crimes were also a peculiar kind - let's say that there are many crimes he could have committed that would have been socially repulsive, and had him reported and ostracised far more quickly than being a rich old man predating on young women. It's on us to change how acceptable that was / is. Edit: it's worth noting i did not think of this straight off - that cultural change is long time coming

CheezeIt 5y ago

> Berman revealed little about what went on inside his office, but said that his team was helped by “some excellent investigative journalism.” He was clearly referring to Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald series “Perversion of Justice.” Well, this is a facile lie, unsurprising from the New York Times, because before Brown, there was Alan Dershowitz and Mike Cernovich (another journalist) suing to unseal documents, and then Brown joined the party. But that would undermine their morality play about newspapers and their funding.

fttx_ 5y ago
This seems dubious to me. Dershowitz appears to be deeply personally implicated in Epstein’s crimes. Brown has been investigating Epstein since early 2017. I can’t see any evidence of Cernovich being involved that early. Do you have any? In fact, Cernovich and Dershowitz working together and “suing to unseal documents” looks like it’s that started in 2019, and while Dershowitz clearly has personal reasons for his involvement it looks like Cernovich’s involvement is in fact directly in response to Brown’s reporting.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  https://s9503.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Epstein-case-unseal-cernovich.pdf https://s9503.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Epstein-cas... “On January 19, 2017, Cernovich, an independent blogger and self‐described “popular political journalist,” moved to intervene, seeking to unseal the summary judgment record, and Dershowitz joined his motion.”

imgabe 5y ago

It’s bonkers to me that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is a joke. Like here’s a known pedophile and sex trafficker connected to almost every powerful person in the world who was very very very obviously murdered to prevent him from testifying about something and the reaction of the mainstream media is “haha, that’s weird, anyway…”

derbOac 5y ago
My strong impression over the last couple of decades is for journalists to take many things at face value and defer to "experts" without digging into things like potential conflicts of interests or motives etc. So if you have a set of experts saying "Epstein killed himself," even if those experts have conflicts of interest and/or were appointed by those with CoI, a lot of journalists will defer. I think a similar phenomenon was in play with the lab leak hypothesis, various things related to Erdogan in Turkey, Russian assassinations in the UK, reporting over the Mueller Report, and a host of other things. I don't think all journalists are like this, and I understand where they're coming from, but increasingly reading between the lines and/or interpreting stated conclusions in the context of human motives seems lost on a lot of journalists and/or journalism outlets. It leads to these weird situations where something is very obviously off about a situation but you can't get someone to say something on the record, so things are just shrugged off, taken at face value, and you're led to doubt your own logic. Often but not always eventually journalists can get someone to say something on the record, and then it's treated like some big revelation. Journalists getting intelligence experts to acknowledge "no it's not really likely someone could kill themselves and then afterwards stuff themselves into a black body bag and zip it up." Then everyone is like "oh ok I wasn't losing my sanity" and there's some correction. But sometimes it's just left to historians to pick up the threads. I'm not saying anything about Epstein or anything in particular, and there's a need to avoid going down conspiracy rabbit holes. But I wish there was more nuance in coverage sometimes, to acknowledge that something weird or shady is going on while acknowledging there's no evidence for anything in particular.
- golemotron 5y ago
  > My strong impression over the last couple of decades is for journalists to take many things at face value and defer to "experts" without digging into things like potential conflicts of interests or motives etc. A lot of it is the fact that there's no money in journalism, never mind investigative journalism. It's cheaper to have people write stories based on their imaginations or their readings of Twitter.