The constant clouds of Epstein’s planet

Is Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator with more than five million subscribers on YouTube, more powerful than satellite news?

I started thinking about this question last year, after it became clear that popular broadcasters like Owens, Joe Rogan, and Theo Vaughn had influenced the outcome of the presidential election. On an unsatisfactory and pedantic level, the answer of course depends on how power is defined. Is it about audience size? The amount of revenue generated? Have hearts and minds won over a particular point of view? But the question led me to another question worth asking as well: whether mainstream media and emerging algorithms are actually competing with each other. Sure, they’re trying to get your attention, but are they describing and commenting on the same world?

In the past three months, I’ve been spending an unfortunate amount of time on TikTok and YouTube, and the algorithms decided to split my attention between golf tips and the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I’m there for the former, but the latter has become so ubiquitous on these platforms that avoiding content about it there would be like traveling to Greenland to get away from the ice and snow. Readers of this column know that I believe these video platforms now have a much greater influence on how Americans receive their news than those of us in traditional news media would like to admit. The mainstream press still lays most of the information foundations on which every creator, analyst, and AI bot builds their ideas, but scoops, context, and new information only spread quickly when processed through these acts of interpretation on social media. Consider Owens. Often cited reports in Wall Street Journal or times, But she uses it to support one narrative about how the world works, which, at this point, is largely about Epstein. Owens has repeatedly suggested that Epstein, on behalf of Israel, recruited powerful people as clients for sexual services so that these people could be controlled through blackmail.

Owens stands out among the presenters of this story, but she is not alone. Across the spectrum of political media, broadly defined, there is an emerging divide that does not follow traditional party lines: There is Planet Norm, home of traditional journalism, and there is Planet Epstein, home of thousands of individual content creators.

When the people of Planet Normé sit down to read or watch a news story, they bring with them some basic assumptions about journalism of the kind offered by CNN or CNN. times Or through this magazine: that reporters seek to communicate the truth to the public so that the public can then make informed decisions as citizens of a democratic state. These assumptions were rejected on Epstein’s planet. There, such beliefs simply prove that everyone on the Normian planet is complicit in covering up what’s really going on. Owens, perhaps like no other media figure, has built a community for those who assume the mainstream press is involved in this vast conspiracy, which, for her and her followers, has come to focus on everything Epstein was doing on that island. Through her video stream and the thousands of clips that fill every major short-form video platform, Owens poses viewers an existential question: Do you believe in the world as mainstream media presents it, or do you believe in it?

Polls are always questionable, at best, but surveys suggest that a growing number of Americans are starting to live on Epstein’s planet — or at least may be drifting toward it. In July, A Quinnipiac poll It found that 63% of voters disapproved of the way the Trump administration handled the Epstein files, a collection of documents related to his case whose significance Trump once promised to release and has since dismissed. A Yahoo/YouGov poll The poll conducted around the same time found that seventy percent of Americans believed the government was hiding information about an alleged list of Epstein’s clients. and last An October poll found that 77% of Americans wanted the government to release every bit of information it had about Epstein. These numbers don’t tell us exactly what the American public believes about the Epstein story, but they do suggest that the kind of skepticism that can prompt people to do their own research is not confined to a small, conspiracy-minded corner of the Internet.

This column is the product of planet Normi. But even after four years of cash in The New Yorker and timesI can’t confidently express the mainstream media’s interpretation of the world, nor am I sure what principles I’m effectively defending by hanging a shingle here on the corporate side of things. Neither the lofty claims about the function of journalism in a democracy nor the conspiracy-based criticisms about our supposed role in the conspiracy seem to me entirely valid. I know many individual journalists who seek the truth and defend it courageously. But I also know that the recent decline in the public’s trust in the mainstream media did not happen simply because Trump said the phrase “fake news.” We’ve made a lot of mistakes, especially during the pandemic. And while I think we’re also right about a lot of things, it’s not hard to understand why so many people look around and see little that’s interesting or compelling about the Normian planet.

Owens and her fellow inhabitants of Planet Epstein don’t have this annoying problem, at least not anymore. Before Epstein, many of them crafted their narratives in direct opposition to the mainstream media — the so-called expert class and liberal technocrats who were on the rise during the Obama administration. But there was a limit to this kind of grievance mongering. You build a following by shouting about timesThe “thought police” that infested the Oberlin faculty, and the racial politics of Disney films. But, at the end of the day, how many people really care about what happens at Oberlin? How many people fear a revolution led by colorful Disney princesses?