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.