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In Thursday’s edition of this newsletter, Emily Bell wrote about the increasingly curious right-wing-media dynamics surrounding the biggest political story of the moment: the Trump administration’s frantic, yet seemingly doomed, attempts to move its base on from conspiracy theories related to Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile who killed himself in jail in 2019, and the base’s refusal to be moved. “Trump is now confronting the outcome of a media ecosystem he invented, one based on panicky, consensus-squashing conspiracy theories,” Bell observed. After returning to office earlier this year, Trump sidelined media organizations he dislikes, she added. “The irony is that the replacement of these ‘difficult’ journalists in the White House press room with supposedly supine MAGA influencers is now causing the Trump presidency more existential strife in five days than he’d encountered in five years of scrutiny from legacy media. The loyalty of the MAGAsphere and its alternative media ecosystem to Trump is being tested by its own ratings. An unreasonable movement, it turns out, cannot easily be reasoned with.”

Hours after Bell wrote, Trump found himself facing another Epstein-related headache, this time courtesy of an outlet with whose owner Trump had palled around at a soccer tournament not a week prior. This outlet, however, was about as legacy as it comes: it was the Wall Street Journal, and it was reporting that Trump contributed a “bawdy” message (and accompanying illustration) to an album that was put together for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, in 2003. (“Happy Birthday,” the note concluded, “and may every day be another wonderful secret.”) Trump, who had reportedly tried to kill the story, was furious, denying that the message was authentic (“I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal) and pledging to sue. The next day, he did just that. The suit marked yet another escalation in Trump’s efforts to kill unfavorable reporting; he has sued major outlets before, of course, but CNN’s Brian Stelter noted that he has never done so while actually in office, and none of the legal experts Stelter canvassed could recall any sitting president going after a news outlet for defamation. It also, of course, more or less guaranteed that this particular example of unfavorable reporting will remain in the news for as long as the lawsuit plays out, which, as Stelter noted, could be years. Someone really needs to tell Trump about the Streisand Effect.

Since Axios reported, over two weeks ago, that the Justice Department and FBI—having teased revelations in Epstein’s case—had concluded that, actually, there was nothing more to see here, I’ve been thinking a lot not only about the right-wing-media dynamics surrounding the story, but the mainstream media dynamics as well, and the links between the two. As Bell noted, and I also observed elsewhere last week, the former have been revealing: MAGA media mostly channels something close to pure Trump sycophancy, but the fury over his administration’s handling of the Epstein saga has shown that this is not totally unconditional; the story has also exposed differences between how many of Trump’s supporters engage with conspiracy theories and how Trump himself relates to them (as I also explored elsewhere). And MAGA media, clearly, is not the MSM. Indeed, the reaction to the Journal’s story put the divide between the two into amusingly stark relief, as voices that had fulminated darkly for days about an Epstein cover-up were handed evidence that logically could have been drafted in support of that case, and instead decided to shoot the messenger. If MAGA-media support for Trump isn’t unconditional, it does still run deep: only he could take a story about his personal ties to Epstein and turn it into a reassertion of his antiestablishment bona fides.

And yet I’d argue that the MSM, on the whole, has never sounded as much like MAGA media as it has this past fortnight; as one unnamed reporter put it to New York’s Charlotte Klein last week, “Perhaps for the first time, the mainstream media and far-right media are sort of rowing in the same direction,” at least when it comes to calling for Trump to release more records. I offer this observation—which is, admittedly, a general one—in the spirit of nuanced analysis more than outright condemnation; conspiracy theories have become so wired into mainstream American political culture that they are now unavoidable objects for the media attached to that culture, and Epstein’s case, with its panoply of genuinely dark and weird details, has always been a potent gateway drug. Nonetheless—and again, this is a general observation, albeit one informed by the truly destabilizing experience of mainlining Epstein journalism in recent days—I can’t avoid the conclusion that some of it has slipped all too eagerly from covering the conspiracy theories around him into indulging them (if, often, only implicitly). I find myself agreeing with a column that Ben Smith, of Semafor, published last night, in which he wrote that the Epstein story “brings out two of the worst traits in journalists and—to really point fingers here—in our audiences. First, the human tendency to fill in gaps with wild theories that flatter our prejudices; second, the bias toward what’s new over what’s known.” (The “larger Epstein belief system,” Smith added, “is QAnon for people who went to college.”) And I heartily cosign his conclusion: that “those of us trying to stay sane ought to keep in mind the distinction between evidence and speculation, fantasy and reality.”

To be clear, the past two weeks have thrown up an enormously interesting and very legitimate news story on all sorts of grounds, not least in terms of what it has said about Trump’s relationship to his voters and the grip of conspiratorial thinking on US politics. I’ve written before that I’m a fan of sweeping works of American history (à la those written by Rick Perlstein) that show what a period was like politically by zooming in on emblematic episodes; when such histories are written about this moment, there is no doubt in my mind that they will contain pages on Epsteingate. The problems have come when the coverage has glided—sometimes almost imperceptibly—out of this mode and into speculating as to whether there actually is a cover-up afoot, because, come to think of it, Trump is sort of behaving weirdly about all this, isn’t he? This is not to say that Trump isn’t behaving weirdly, or that there aren’t legitimate outstanding questions related to Epstein that reporters should try to answer. Indeed, the recent news cycle has served up several intriguing stories based on actual reporting: Wired finding that supposedly “raw” surveillance footage from the jail where Epstein killed himself had actually been edited; the New York Times reporting that an Epstein victim now claims to have told law enforcement to take a look at some of Epstein’s associates, including Trump; the Journal’s story about the suggestive message in the birthday album.

And yet none of these stories is—or would claim to be—a smoking gun. All are caveated, and ultimately raise further questions; Smith argued that while the Journal’s scoop was impressive (and, specifically, “hilarious and gross”), it didn’t really reveal much that was new about Trump, given that he once went on the record to describe Epstein as a “terrific” guy who likes women on “the younger side.” A lack of “novelty” does not mean a lack of merit, per se: if I’ve long been annoyed, during the Trump era, by stories that claim explosive new evidence of Trump’s character only to ultimately attest to traits that should be very obvious by now, it’s also true that news fatigue has sometimes allowed him to skate by stories that would be absolutely disastrous for any other president. (Just imagine the reaction if Joe Biden had been accused of the Epstein birthday message.) The key thing, in this context, is that stories establish what they can claim, and what they can’t—a basic function of journalism that is nonetheless alien to many MAGA-media types, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis noted last week. “Reporters do not content themselves with ‘just asking questions’—the internet conspiracist’s favored formulation,” Lewis wrote. “They gather evidence, check facts, and then decide what they are confident is true. They don’t just blast out everything that lands on their desk, in a ‘kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out’ kind of way. That’s because some conspiracy theories turn out to involve actual conspiracies, and the skill is separating the imagined schemes from the real ones.”

If this sounds obvious to real journalists, it hasn’t always been evident in some of the coverage I’ve consumed in the past two weeks, which has itself sometimes slipped into just asking questions mode. This has not been the stuff of the true fever swamps; you still can’t go on MSNBC and call Trump the leader of a satanic pedophile cabal. But it seems like one now can slide into the idea not only that Trump might be covering something up by not releasing the Epstein files, but that this is basically Occam’s razor at this point. And yet, not only is there no firm evidence for this proposition, but there are good reasons why it would not be the case; as Benjamin Wittes suggested in an astute column for Lawfare, releasing the Epstein files in their entirety would surely expose not only Epstein’s many victims to the glare of public scrutiny, but also the identities of entirely innocent—or, at least, not proven guilty—parties who would, doubtless, quickly be tarred with guilt by association. In this, Wittes seemed to echo comments made by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said recently that releasing the full Epstein files would involve the publication of child pornography, and Trump himself, who said on Fox ahead of the election last year that while he would be inclined to release further Epstein documents, “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there.” It is possible to scrutinize these individuals’ conduct around the Epstein files—and, in Trump’s case, the consistency of his statement on Fox—while acknowledging that, actually, both of these points have a lot of merit.

(On the subject of that Trump-Fox interview before the election, a quick detour: Fox has recently been scrutinized for airing an abbreviated version of Trump’s answer in which it edited out the caveats and made him sound keener on releasing the Epstein files than he actually was. It’s reasonable to debate whether this was good editing; for what it’s worth, Fox did air the fuller version of the exchange around the same time, and has referred to the shorter version as being the result of “standard editorial cuts for time.” What is vastly less reasonable is a senior House Democrat demanding that Fox answer questions about the edit—a form of interference that liberals should want nothing whatsoever to do with even if Trump did do it first, via his risible, yet now settled, lawsuit over editing practices at CBS last year. Indeed, this episode reflects a broader recent trend of elected Democrats themselves starting to sound like Epstein truthers—a form of political opportunism, most likely, but one that has corrosive potential, and has spilled into media coverage, lending the notion of a cover-up that most prized of Beltway-media properties: bipartisan credence.)

Obviously, journalists have a professional and democratic interest in calling for the government to disclose things. In this case, though, there are ways to do so thoughtfully, that don’t impinge on the basic tenets of due process. (Wittes laid some of these out in his column.) And journalists must balance the pursuit of information with an understanding of the real-world consequences of disclosure. Again, Epstein had many victims who must live every day with that victimhood, and yet have seemed to be an afterthought in the recent wave of coverage. Last week, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose investigations of Epstein in the late 2010s helped put him behind bars, noted this in an interview with The Atlantic. “This is just a horrible nightmare for them,” Brown said. “Even though I’m a journalist, I am a human being too. And I just think that what they went through and they’re still continuing to go through is painful. Painful.”

As the latest Epstein news cycle has unfolded, I’ve been thinking back on Brown’s initial reporting, the history of the Epstein story, and also on the differences between the information environment that it first entered into and what we have today. In some ways, that era’s instinct to cordon off conspiracy theories from mainstream media discourse—aside from to debunk or condemn them—hasn’t aged particularly well: at best, one might argue, it looks now like a failed attempt to contain informational toxicity; at worst, it may have betrayed a lack of curiosity—a blindness, even, to the potency of the narratives driving this political age. (“Journalists tend not to believe in conspiracy theories and are so quick to ignore them as insane ideas that it gives us a blind spot in our reporting,” an unnamed political reporter told Klein, of New York. “We can’t always see, or track, how these theories end up meaning a lot to voters and influencing political decisions.”) But these theories are still toxic. And handling them too loosely has consequences, too. 

As many observers noted, the Epstein story has seemed to finally expose the limits of Trump’s power to make the news cycle obey his touch; his control over what journalists cover, in hindsight, has probably never been as calculated as it might appear, but he has flailed with notable frustration in trying to move on from this story. Left unanswered in such analysis, however, is the question of what is driving this news cycle. There are various plausible answers—one of which, clearly, is still “Trump himself,” albeit in a very Streisandy way—but I think the ultimate answer revealed itself in Bell’s piece, when she wrote that “the seeds of the Epstein obsession were sown by the QAnon conspiracists who believed that Trump was in fact Q, the messiah who would save the world from an evil ring of liberal child abusers.” This is absolutely not to say that the current Epstein imbroglio is not newsworthy—it clearly is—or that covering it equates to complicity with QAnon. But it’s sobering to think none of us would likely still be talking about this if it weren’t for believers in a satanic cult of pedophiles who drink children’s blood keeping it on the agenda—and it is essential to keep in mind that such people aren’t our allies in seeking the truth, but rather desperately preoccupied with living out a predetermined fantasy and punishing anyone who gets in their way. This is a story that demands the utmost care. I’m not sure we’ve seen that in the recent coverage; not always, at any rate. An unreasonable moment, it turns out, cannot easily be reasoned with.

Other notable stories
By Jem Bartholomew

• “THIS IS BIG!!!” Those were the words of Donald Trump, on his Truth Social platform, after Congress voted on Friday to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funding that was approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). As CJR’s Betsy Morais put it over the weekend, the CPB “funds PBS, NPR, and local stations across the country. The last of these is due to suffer the greatest consequences.” Many rural and tribal public radio stations rely on CPB for more than half their annual budgets. “I’m assuming we’ll have to cut jobs, but I’m not sure which ones,” Mollie Kabler, executive director of CoastAlaska, told Andrew Mercein, in CJR’s piece about the stations likely to be devastated by the cuts. Friday’s vote saw the House of Representatives pass the Rescissions Act of 2025 by a vote of 216 to 213—two Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing the bill, which had been passed by the Senate 51–48 the day before—which also slashed about $7 billion in foreign aid. The CPB cuts realize a decades-long conservative dream to defund public media. Kabler added: “It’s hard to do philanthropy and journalism without the funds for public media.”

• On Thursday night, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, announced on-air that “the network will be ending The Late Show in May. [Audience boos.] Yeah! I share your feelings.” CBS is not replacing Colbert—who took over from David Letterman, host between 1993 and 2015—but canceling The Late Show entirely. CBS called it “purely a financial decision” amid a difficult late-night TV environment, adding that the decision was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content, or other matters happening at [CBS’s parent company] Paramount.” And the New York Times reported, citing two insiders, that the show is losing tens of millions of dollars a year. But speculation quickly turned to whether the decision was politically motivated. Colbert has been an outspoken critic of the president and of Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year. (Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” CJR covered it here.) The Writers Guild of America called on New York State officials to launch an investigation into CBS’s decision. On Truth Social, meanwhile, Trump applauded.

• A Manhattan federal judge threw out a nearly $50 million lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against the journalist Bob Woodward on Friday, after Woodward published interview tapes from his 2020 book Rage as an audiobook. Woodward, who made his name helping uncover the Watergate scandal as a Washington Post reporter, interviewed Trump nineteen times between December 2019 and August 2020. After the audiobook, The Trump Tapes, came out, Trump sued in January 2023, alleging copyright infringement, and that he’d told Woodward the interviews were to be used solely for the book; Woodward said he never agreed to that stipulation. (Jon Allsop wrote for CJR about the audiobook when it was released.) On Friday the judge said Trump could not plausibly allege that the intention had been to become joint authors of the audiobook. Trump now has until August 18 to amend his complaint a third time.

• In Vienna earlier this month, OPEC—the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose twelve member countries control about 40 percent of crude oil production and can move the needle on global oil prices—excluded five major news organizations from its biennial seminar. Bloomberg News reported that no reason was given when it—alongside the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters—was not accredited, while other titles got access. The move widened a similar exclusion for three media organizations two years ago, which the FT reported at the time was “driven by Saudi Arabia.” In 2023, CJR and Covering Climate Now copublished a Q&A with Lawrence Carter, of the Centre for Climate Reporting, after he worked on an investigation uncovering “a massive, multipronged strategy by Saudi Arabia to artificially boost fossil fuel demand.”

• And tributes were paid to Ismail Abu Hatab, a Palestinian filmmaker and photojournalist who the Committee to Protect Journalists confirmed was killed on June 30 by an Israeli air strike on a beachfront café in Gaza City. “Ismail Abu Hatab was more than our colleague—he was a kind soul and a dedicated professional,” the American Friends Service Committee, which Abu Hatab had worked for, said in a statement earlier this month. “We vow to carry your light.” CPJ said Bayan Abusultan, a freelance journalist, was also injured by shrapnel to the chest and head in the attack. The Guardian reported that between twenty-four and thirty-six people were killed at the busy café, where journalists and residents often gathered to access the internet, with the strike conducted with a five-hundred-pound MK-82 bomb. An associate director at Human Rights Watch said the incident should be “investigated as a war crime.” Meanwhile, in the past twenty-four hours, news wires are reporting that dozens of people were killed when Israeli forces fired on crowds seeking aid—in what the AP described as the “deadliest day yet for aid-seekers in over 21 months of war as at least 85 Palestinians were killed while trying to reach food.”

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