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Partisan Media Coverage of Epstein Masks His Links to Both Sides of the Political Establishment
by Alan Macleod, MintPress News:
The Jeffrey Epstein saga continues to rumble on. Earlier this month, the deceased sexual predator’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested and charged with luring and grooming children into his sex ring. Epstein, who died in prison in suspicious circumstances last August, was connected to huge swaths of the global elite, counting billionaire business owners, hotshot lawyers and professors, members of the royal family, and foreign leaders among his closest acquaintances.
Perhaps the two most important and notable, however, given their enormous influence, are former President Bill Clinton and current President, Donald Trump. Clinton, already infamous for the numerous women accusing him of sexual misconduct (including rape), is known to have flown all around the world with Epstein on his private jet, the Lolita Express, which he used to ferry girls to his private Caribbean island where he allegedly imprisoned and raped them. Locals report seeing the former president there.
President Trump also has deep ties to the disgraced New York fraudster. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” he said in 2002, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.” Like Clinton, Trump was also a flyer on the Lolita Express, Epstein claiming both that it was he who introduced him to his wife Melania and that Clinton “owed him some favors.”
The office of the president of the United States is the most powerful in the world. Epstein is known to have cajoled and blackmailed his powerful associates. Did the two presidents’ connections to him influence U.S. public policy? If we do not investigate, we cannot know.
We rely largely on the corporate press to carry out such investigations, shaping our understanding of the world in the process. However, the great majority of what we consume comes mediated through ultra-partisan outlets pushing a clear agenda. The two most widely viewed networks in the U.S. are Fox News and MSNBC, both of which have clear party loyalties, Fox to the Republicans, and MSNBC to the Democrats. Unfortunately, as well shall see, they are both spinning the Epstein story hard to shield their champion from blame while simultaneously demonizing the opposing president. As Liz Franczak from the Epstein-focused TrueAnon podcast said, the story, “so perfectly encapsulates and implicates both sides of the ruling class and yet you have these polarized sides, team red, team blue, pulling out what they want for their own purposes and refusing to understand, see or even admit that this crosses both. This encapsulates everyone.”
Media have already been under the spotlight for their poor coverage of the affair. Epstein is known to have had connections to influential media figures like George Stephanopoulos, Katie Couric, Charlie Rose in addition to some of the media’s biggest sponsors, such as Bill Gates. Last year, ABC News anchor Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic lambasting network executives for killing her investigations into his network — precisely because of his connections — allowing him to remain at large for three more years. Yet the only one facing consequences was the producer accused of leaking the clip in the first place, not those who protected, “ the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” as Robach described him.
In order to gauge the level of partisan coverage, this study analyzed all articles or show transcripts from MSNBC.com featuring the words “Jeffrey Epstein Donald Trump” or “Jeffrey Epstein Bill Clinton” and all results appearing under the “Jeffrey Epstein” topic on FoxNews.com, counting the number of articles mentioning each president’s links to the deceased sex offender. The date range was July 6, 2019 (Epstein’s arrest) to July 13, 2020 (the first day of data collection). Full documentation can be found here.
The results were exactly as Franczak suspected, with both networks showing a strong bias (an over 2:1 ratio) towards associating the opposing party to the pedophile, while downplaying their own candidate’s incriminating ties to him. 19 MSNBC articles or segments mentioned Clinton’s links to Epstein, as opposed to 45 for Trump. But Fox News flipped that on its head, associating Epstein far more with Clinton (78 times) than with Trump (37 times).
While these findings already reveal a great disparity in the coverage, they actually undersell the level of bias in reporting because they do not take into account the quality and context of the references. On the MSNBC show, “The 11th Hour,” a former federal prosecutor reacted to the news of Epstein’s arrest by saying “I’m a lifelong Democrat. If there are Democrats in there, let it come out. If there are Republicans in there, let it come out. This should not be about politics. This is – if anybody abused those girls, it ought to come out and they ought to be prosecuted and I’m for it.” Host Brian Williams responded: “Yes, hear hear, I think most thinking individuals would agree with that.”
