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.