Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves - The American Prospect

Almost nobody noticed earlier this month when the New York Daily News announced what felt like a 500th round of layoffs. Not long ago, the venerable working-class tabloid behind “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” would have been the ideal outlet for demystifying the prodigious evils of the Uptown Epstein network for outer-borough New Yorkers who elected Zohran Mamdani. But the latest iteration of “New York’s Hometown Newspaper” has all of four reporters covering national news.

The “adults in the room” always say a conspiracy theory becomes less plausible for every individual and institution it implicates. But the Epstein network is so vast and so varied it would suggest that the conspiracy is the system, if we had any institutions capable of making sense of it. The New York Times is too prissy, too compromised by social standing to reliably narrate the scope of the thing without shifting reflexively into contrarian debunk mode; podcasts and social media are too ephemeral to grasp the magnitude of anything. The organization most ideally suited to the task, Obama-era Gawker, was run out of business by an eight-figure litigation revenge plot masterminded by Peter Thiel, which Jeffrey Epstein generously offered to help bankroll.

Somewhat incredibly, a document in the January 30 Epstein file dump suggests that the New York Daily News was one of these institutions—integral to the Epstein network while grasping to make sense of its tentacles—and that Epstein personally might have played a critical role in exacerbating its wrenching demise.