A reporter’s fight to expose Epstein’s crimes, and earn a living
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
Journalists don't make claims that they can't back up. On net, I think this is for the best. Journalists upholding this code is what gives us useful, credible news.
> 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.
I think conventional reporting on Epstein's death features all the anomalies but stopped making claims when the trail of evidence ran cold. If you can't provide any evidence that the guard was paid to look the other way, that's sadly where the story ends.
However, a really cool and interesting phenomenon is what happens to people at interesting stages of their lives. People who have kept secrets sometimes feel shame or pity when they realize they're dying or when they have children. So we could end up with some surprising revelations in the century to come.
From babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Manafort meeting with Assange in the London Embassy to an infinite number of other provable falsehoods, if history has taught us anything, its that journalists routinely make claims they can't back up.
Either way, it's not the important part of the story.
Guarding Jeffrey Epstein seemed very much like a strict liability situation. If it was obvious to everyone on the planet that Epstein would have some sort of "suicide" on your watch, and you failed to bubble wrap him in gopros and triple-guard him with officers from three different units, you're just at fault, period.
Wardens can't realistically control every single thing that happens on their turf. But they can absolutely keep the single most important prisoner in the country alive, even against that prisoner's will, if they want to.
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.
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.
Digital subscriptions obviously don't incur the same physical distribution costs Although a fair bit still exists so long as you're going to have a physical paper and the digital production has its own costs. (Digital plus physical costs more than physical alone.)
In any case, how many people who won't pay $100/year for the NYT--plus maybe another $100/year for something like The Economist will pay $100-200/year for a broad-based subscription to a bunch of different pubs?
On the other hand, subsidizing the cost of production of information that's already been produced and account for? That makes no sense from an economic perspective. If you're talking about reaping benefits for past work (not accounting for a "cost" because past production costs nothing in the present by definition), it raises ethical questions: why would the newspaper/editor get paid and not the actual author, now that the logistical work of publishing the article has been accounted for (and even profited upon) by the editor?
There is nothing inherently natural or fair about copyright laws. We need broader perspectives if we want to develop a knowledge economy based on sharing information and resources for social progress, if you'd like to call it like that.
I don't know in the english-speaking world, apart from the Intercept who i understand has its own internal controversies, but in the french-speaking world we have a few independent publications, like CQFD, L'envolée, Le Monde Libertaire, Mediapart, Le Canard Enchaîné... I assume it's the same on your side of the ocean and they're just not well known?
> Let Google track my reading
Why would you need tracking? There's some donation-based subscriptions for publications, and a centralized donation dashboard sounds amazing. Liberapay and similar donation-based platforms are good for that kind of stuff.
Also, how would you actually measure? Size in bytes of content? Number of characters? Time spent? Is there any metric that can be fair to all and cannot be gamed to maximize profits while not providing quality content?
Also Kindle Unlimited, what's that? Is that like spotify/netflix for ebooks? I'm personally hostile to private companies operating such schemes, but as a public service it sounds like it may make sense.
Of course, the tracking is unacceptable either way, and we should pursue better models in order to finance cultural productions. Hint: the answers are the same as for every other area of activities (including free software), just redistribute the **ing wealth already, which the people who "own" it didn't produce.
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.
But then lots of the 'premium' became like extra premium.
Even though I still pay for it premium articles included now are mostly magazines, which the New Yorker and Businessweek are good but most are like lifestyle I don't really care about.
I would like WaPo back in the bundle and same with adding NyTimes.
I'd pay another $5 a month but seems like the big papers make more themselves even with smaller % of readers.
Seems like streaming is going the same way.
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
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.
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
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").
I assume those organizations can silence investigative journalism that would expose their inner workings.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffr...
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.
OK. So what I'm getting is that he wasn't working "mainly" for the Americans and even if he was, they wouldn't countenance running sex trafficking rings for minors on American soil, for years.
Given that, it doesn't make sense for "someone" to tell him Epstein "'belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”.
My personal view is that Epstein was essentially a blackmailer, that was occasionally useful in passing information to intelligence agencies as a result of his activities.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”