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…”
I wouldn't mind paying for quality journalism, and thus support journalists like Ms Brown.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>We are just outsourcing the hard work.<p>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.<p>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
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.
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?<p>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").
> 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.”<p>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.<p>But that would undermine their morality play about newspapers and their funding.