Why Do Predation and Bigotry Thrive? Ask the National Media.
The elite press sees itself as a ruling class, providing cover for the powerful and treating the vulnerable as prey.
Opinion, by Billie Jean Sweeney
“Quiet, quiet piggy!” Donald Trump told a woman reporter traveling in the press corps aboard Air Force One Friday night, wagging a threatening finger as she tried to ask about the Epstein files. The exchange, witnessed by colleagues and documented in a pool report posted on X, was ignored by the national media until People magazine exposed Trump’s misogynistic insult three days later.
During that same period, on Sunday, the New York Times declared the “protected realm” of elite sexual predation was long gone, “vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.” In effect, the Times proclaimed, there’s nothing to see here anymore.
Few snapshots in time better demonstrate how the big national press fosters a culture of elite impunity. The corporatization and rightward shift of big outlets has caused the elite national press to see themselves less as objective journalists reporting stories than as part of a ruling class that chooses winners and losers, offering cover to the former and treating the latter as targets— deciding who are society’s winners and who are their prey.
Women, people of color, queer people and trans people have fallen squarely into the second category.
Condé Nast — which last month eliminated Teen Vogue, one of the few national platforms featuring queer political perspectives, and purged several leading queer journalists from its ranks — is now welcoming the return to the national stage of a journalist who had deceived readers in her coverage of the most elite of politicians, Robert Kennedy Jr. As that writer’s self-aggrandizing book is being promoted heavily by big national media, a book by Karen Attiah examining the state-sponsored murder of the independent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been suppressed.
The Epstein emails go to the heart of elite impunity and the media’s central role in fostering its culture. The emails released thus far, just a portion of those collected by investigators, “implicates multiple members of the American ruling class as complicit in a criminal conspiracy,” wrote Brad Reed in Common Dreams, noting that Epstein’s regular correspondents ranged from the former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler to right-wingers such as the billionaire Peter Thiel and the podcaster Steve Bannon.
On Bluesky, the political scientist Ed Burmila said, “The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit Send… They didn't put this stuff in writing because they're naive or ignorant; they did it because they have no fear of consequences. None at all.”
Donna Ladd, the founding editor of the Mississippi Free Press, was among the many independent journalists who questioned why the nation’s biggest media outlets did not pursue Epstein’s long trail of abuse rigorously in a way that would “center the people over protecting power.”
The Mississippi Free Press, a nonprofit founded in 2020 to pursue public interest reporting, is part of a growing network of independent news outlets filling an ever-gaping void left by national media. The organization recently republished Ladd’s own story of having been sexually assaulted in high school and the enduring societal structures that enable abuse — as she put it, “the ugly, execrable, self-propagating system of power, helped by obsequious media and sick justifications of abusive misogyny and predators.”
How do the systems of power play out in the elite media? The emails offer a window.
A reporter for The New York Times, Landon Thomas Jr., was among Epstein’s regular contacts, exchanging dozens of chummy emails both before and after the 2016 election, many of them giving Epstein public relations advice on how to rehabilitate his image.
In one December 2015 exchange, Epstein asks Thomas “would you like photso (sic) of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen”? Though Thomas responded “yes,” the emails released thus far do not reflect any followup by Thomas or other Times journalists. It’s not clear whether Epstein ever had such photos.
Thomas left the Times in 2019 without public explanation, several months after telling his editors that he had sought a contribution from Epstein for a Manhattan cultural center, a conflict of interest that was first reported by NPR’s David Folkenflik. NPR confirmed a $30,000 donation was made by a foundation controlled by Epstein.
In its story this week about the “Bygone Elite,” which addressed the behavior of other public figures, the Times included a one-paragraph reference to its former reporter that acknowledged the solicitation. The story did not address questions about the photos Epstein appeared to offer or Thomas’s long-running personal communications with Epstein.
Nor would a Times spokesperson address questions from Assigned Media as to whether editors were aware of the 2015 email exchange regarding the offer of photos or to what extent they were aware of Thomas’s extensive personal advice to Epstein. A message sent to Thomas on LinkedIn did not get a response.
In its story, the Times paints the supposed bygone era of elite predation in gauzy, almost wistful strokes — “the twilight of an old guard made up of Wall Street billionaires (and) media-industry heavyweights” — that is in stark contrast to the harshly biased tone it uses in pieces about trans people, a vulnerable and virtually powerless population.
The first sentence of a piece last November, shortly after a Trump victory aided mightily by the paper’s years-long stream of anti-trans disinformation, began thusly: “To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism.”
To this day, sexual predation by a powerful elite who pose a grave danger to women is treated gently and provided cover by the Times’s leaders, while a tiny minority group who pose no threat to anyone and whose rights have been virtually erased, is treated with undisguised contempt.
In an interview I did a few months ago with Kyle Pope, the former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, he discussed a sense that the national media was shy of calling out injustice, that it saw itself as “part of the ruling class.”
“What does this mean for people who are not like you?” he asked at the time. “Where are the people you’re covering? Who are you writing for?’
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.