A Dead Cat, A Lawyer's Call And A 5-Figure Donation: How Media Fell Short On Epstein

[Mrs. Overall]

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/22/753390385/a-dead-cat-a-lawyers-call-and-a-5-figure-donation-how-media-fell-short-on-epstei

A coterie of intimidating lawyers. A deployment of charm. An aura of invincibility. A five-figure donation to a New York Times reporter's favored nonprofit. A bullet delivering a message. Even, it is alleged, a cat's severed head in the front yard of the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.

Such were the tools the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is said to have used to try to soften news coverage and at times stave off journalistic scrutiny altogether.

Before his death earlier this month, Epstein owned the largest townhouse in Manhattan, little more than a mile from many of the nation's leading news organizations. He counted a former and a future president among his friends. He partied with royalty and supermodels. He was said to advise billionaires.

Epstein killed himself, authorities say, in federal prison as he faced criminal charges alleging sex trafficking of underage girls, some as young as 14, in his mansions in New York and Florida. And yet with a few notable exceptions, the national media infrequently covered Epstein's behavior and rarely looked at the associates who helped him evade accountability for his actions — at least, not until the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown's investigative series late last year.

[Botany]

1. "Epstein killed himself, authorities say, ...

[Kid Berwyn]

4. It's like the writer doesn't know authorities never lie.

Except for that time in the Gulf of Tonkin or that time in Paris or that time at the Watergate or that time in Madrid or that time Hasenfus’ plane got shot down or that time Ollie North said he’d stand on his head or that time Bush pardoned Weinberger or that time Bush Jr. said Iraq had WMDs or that time...

[Me.]

2. "By early January 2019, Landon Thomas Jr was gone from the Times"

“Colleagues pulled up his clippings. Thomas had not written frequently about Epstein. But several Times staffers say they were appalled by a piece they found.

It included this lyrical passage: "As his legal troubles deepened, Mr. Epstein gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St. Thomas in the distance, poked at a lunch of crab and rare steak prepared by his personal chef, and tried to explain how his life had taken such a turn," Thomas wrote. "He likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput."

The article largely presented Epstein as someone who solicited prostitutes, not committed sex crimes against minors. (Federal agents had by then identified several dozen possible victims.)

Rereading the story in August 2018, Thomas' colleagues recalled the exclusives their paper broke that propelled the #MeToo awakening. This, they say, was an embarrassment.”

[ck4829]

3. K&R