Why the Latest Epstein Scandal Caught the Media by Surprise

Photo: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images

Last Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office announced that an “exhaustive review” of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had not turned up his supposed “client list,” that Epstein had killed himself in prison (as opposed to being murdered by a shadowy cabal of powerful pedophiles), and that the department would not be disclosing more details about him. This would not count as news for most readers and viewers of the mainstream press. But the blowback on the right has spiraled into one of the biggest crises in Donald Trump’s second term so far, pitting die-hard conspiracy theorists against a president who vowed to release the “Epstein Files” — catching a lot of journalists by surprise.

“No doubt for mainstream-media readers, the Epstein rift came out of nowhere,” said a New York Times reporter. “We had not established how important this story was to a good chunk of the MAGA base.” A political reporter at a rival publication added, “Prior to the memo’s release, we underreported the amount of right-wing anger at Bondi, and after the memo’s release, we were slow to continue to report on the right wing’s mounting anger at this.”

With hundreds of journalists obsessing over every word Trump utters, it seems hard to believe that so many of them could miss a crisis that, with 20/20 hindsight, was coming a mile away. It underscores how atomized the news environment has become, resulting in audiences and journalists living in entirely different political realities. But in the case of Epstein, it also shows that there may be more overlap between right-wing fever-swamp media and mainstream media than most journalists would like to admit.

The fallout, at the very least, is real. At an event for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA this weekend, Epstein “was all anyone was talking about,” said the political reporter, “and Charlie Kirk couldn’t ignore it and his guest couldn’t ignore it and then they were onstage feeding the mob.” Representative Nancy Mace told the Times, “It’s every social-media platform, every phone call into the office. You see that interest on an issue, and you’ve got to respond.” This is the easy part of the story to cover: the motions in Congress to release the government’s information about Epstein, Kirk flip-flopping on whether Epstein matters, Trump telling his supporters that it’s the Democrats who created the Epstein Files hoax, instead of a parade of Trump allies telling every podcast host and Fox News anchor that Trump would definitely expose the conspiracy on day one. In February, Bondi even offered conservative influencers white binders supposedly containing a preview of secret documents related to Epstein that turned out to contain little new information.

What’s harder to cover is the events that led us here. Over the years, mainstream outlets have published many, many investigations into Epstein and his associates. What began with Gawker publishing Epstein’s so-called Black Book in 2015 evolved into Julie K. Brown’s definitive series in the Miami Herald in 2017 and 2018 exposing Epstein’s crimes, followed by his arrest and death. Meanwhile, Pizzagate and QAnon — both premised on cabals of Democratic pedophiles — gained steam. “All of this gives more mainstream right-wing figures an opportunity to take advantage of some of that QAnon energy: They can use Epstein’s story as a way to nod to the QAnon theories of widespread Democratic child-sex trafficking and to bolster their own audiences,” said Matthew Gertz of Media Matters. “You can run segments on it on Fox News in a way that you just can’t about QAnon, and so that makes it a much broader right-wing story.”

But there haven’t been concrete news developments since Epstein’s death, which makes it hard for mainstream outlets to assign stories even though the MAGA-verse is talking about Epstein constantly. “No one knows quite what to say about it beyond the investigative reporting,” said Gertz. “But the right-wing press is very good at discourse, at meaning making.” And as the Times reporter added, “Conspiracy theories are hard to write about. You do not want to give false stories or murky stories extra airtime,” and “explaining conspiracy theories can be kind of dull writing.”

The public remains fascinated with Epstein. A CNN poll conducted in the days after the memo’s release found that half of Americans are dissatisfied with the amount of information the federal government has released about the Epstein case. As the political reporter told me, “It is a piñata full of conspiracy-theory candy, and it got whacked open with that DoJ memo.”

But some actual stories came out of the piñata, too, including Wired reporting that what the DoJ and FBI described as “full raw” surveillance footage from Epstein’s prison cell — released last week along with the memo — was actually two video files stitched together with nearly three minutes trimmed. “Some outlets may feel like these Epstein Files are such a joke and just part of the Trump chaos machine with all of these crazy people attached to it, so there’s a dismissal of it. Until it blows up in the president’s face and then it becomes a story,” said Wired editor-in-chief Katie Drummond. “We certainly found newsworthy information. It was kind of baffling to me that nobody else did that.” And now news organizations are scrambling to jump on new Epstein leads. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003, Trump sent Epstein a letter with a crude illustration of a woman with the note: ““Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

“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,” said another political reporter. “We can’t always see, or track, how these theories end up meaning a lot to voters and influencing political decisions — like who Trump picked to lead the FBI,” a reference to Kash Patel, a huge Epstein Files truther. That’s all changed with the explosion of the Epstein controversy. “Perhaps for the first time, the mainstream media and far-right media are sort of rowing in the same direction,” another reporter said. “Everyone’s like, He probably should disclose more records. But what new records they can disclose, I don’t know.”