Why The Media Won't Cover The Epstein Files

And What We Can Do About It

Late last week, under bipartisan pressure from Congress, the Justice Department released over three million documents from the Epstein files, containing over 3,000 mentions of the current, sitting president.

This horrific revelation—that the President of the United States is intimately linked to a prolific sex trafficker potentially connected to a foreign country’s spy agency—was treated as a five-alarm fire from mainstream media. It got wall-to-wall treatment on cable news, banner headlines and special editions from the country’s leading newspapers, and was basically inescapable the past 120 hours.

Oh wait. It didn’t.

The revelations were covered by corporate media—but only in a roundabout way. It got mentioned on cable news, but was dispensed with as perfunctorily as possible. The morning shows did their due diligence, but quickly switched to cooking segments and Grammy award previews.

But why? Why didn’t mainstream media care that much about this latest Epstein files release?

It’s because Trump’s two-step plan is unfolding perfectly.

Step One: Bully

Donald Trump is a notorious litigator. Being a nepo baby with seemingly unlimited resources—either his own or his family’s or his friends’—Trump has long exploited a fundamental flaw in America’s “justice” system: there’s one set of rules for the working class, and another for the rich.

If you have unlimited resources, you can take anyone or anything to court. You can bury the opposition in legal motions requiring thousands of dollars in attorney fees to even respond to. You can drag cases out for years; you can appeal and appeal and appeal.

The point isn’t to win. The point is to drain your opponent’s resources, sap their will to fight, and make the cost of telling the truth so astronomical that it becomes cheaper to just shut up.

We saw this strategy play out in real time last December when my former employer ABC News agreed to pay Trump an outrageous $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after George Stephanopoulos correctly called Trump a rapist on air. This is despite the fact a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, and the judge in that case explicitly said Trump’s conduct met the definition of rape.

ABC folded. Disney, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, decided it was easier to pay Trump than to fight him in court—even though the truth was on their side. (Stephanopoulos was apparently pissed. I’m surprised he didn’t quit.)

I can tell you from working in the trenches there on 66th street: the message received by every journalist working at ABC News—and every other corporate media outlet—was crystal clear. Your corporate overlords will not back you up.

Even if you report something that’s demonstrably true, Trump can and will sue. And when he does, you’re on your own. So you’d better make damn sure you have every single fact triple-checked, every source bulletproof, every claim legally airtight.

But here’s the problem: what journalist has that kind of time?

My former colleagues are more overworked than ever, expected to do more with less. Newsrooms have been gutted, staffs have been slashed and you’re racing to hit the next deadline. You’re busy churning out content to feed the algorithm, competing with a thousand other outlets for clicks.

You don’t have time to build an ironclad legal case for every story. You don’t have the resources to prepare for a multi-million dollar lawsuit every time you report on the president. And you sure as hell don’t have the financial cushion to risk your job, your healthcare, and your family’s security on a story your bosses might not defend.

So you soften the language. You add more caveats. You move on to safer stories. You self-censor.

That’s the point of the bullying. Trump doesn’t need to win in court. He just needs journalists to know that reporting certain stories—even if they’re true—may cost you everything—and employers won’t pay the bill.

Step Two: Bury

But Trump’s strategy doesn’t stop at intimidation. The second step is information overload—and the Epstein files release is a textbook example.

Three million documents, dropped all at once, barely redacted. Full of salacious details, graphic images (inducing uncensored nude images), and mentions of powerful people from across the political spectrum. It was a complete mess of information that would take teams of reporters (and lawyers) months to properly sift through, verify, and contextualize.

This wasn’t an accident. This was strategic.

Trump’s team knew exactly what they were doing. They released everything in one massive data dump precisely because they understand information warfare. They understand that journalists, already intimidated and under-resourced, won’t be able to process such an avalanche of documents.

When you’re facing down three million pages of documents and you’ve got maybe six hours before your show comes on, what do you do? You scan for the most obviously newsworthy items. You report what you can verify quickly. You move on.

And critically, when there’s SO much information—some of it unverified, some of it potentially misleading, some of it clearly included to muddy the waters—you become extra cautious. You don’t want to get a detail wrong and face Trump’s legal machine.

So the coverage becomes tentative. Hedged. Brief.

This technique has a name in propaganda and information warfare circles. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said it explicitly: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

It’s called the “firehose of falsehood” in disinformation research. The objective isn’t to convince people of a single lie, it’s to drown them in so many conflicting claims that they can’t figure out what’s true anymore. It’s cognitive overload, exploiting the fact that it takes far more energy to verify and refute false claims than it does to produce them.

Trump’s Epstein files release uses this same principle, but with a twist: instead of flooding with obvious falsehoods, you flood with an overwhelming amount of real information. The sheer volume makes it impossible for journalists to do their job properly. And when they inevitably miss things or can’t provide comprehensive coverage, it feeds into Trump’s narrative that the media is incompetent or biased.

It’s brilliant, in a deeply cynical way. Release everything at once, and you guarantee that nothing gets the sustained investigative attention it deserves.

The System Behind the Silence

And Trump’s plan is more effective because of who corporate media serves at the end of the day—and it’s not you and me.

Because ultimately, in capitalism, corporate media exists to return value to shareholders—not to report the facts or hold power to account. If those things happen that’s good, but that’s not the main objective.

Anything that jeopardizes that quarterly earnings call is discouraged. And if you cost Disney money (or the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or BuzzFeed) money—it will cost you your job.

My former colleagues, many of whom are brilliant journalists who care deeply about the truth—also have mortgages. They have kids in school. They have medical bills and student loans and aging parents. And because we have virtually no social safety net in this country, they cannot afford to take risks that might cost them their jobs.

The system is not set up to reward risk-taking. It’s set up to reward ratings and clicks and quarterly growth. Editors and producers know that a cooking segment with surprising ingredients will generate more engagement than a complex political corruption story. They know that confronting a president who will sue you into oblivion is expensive and might hurt the bottom line.

So when Trump bullies the media into submission and then buries them under mountains of information they can’t possibly process, most journalists make the rational choice: they do what they can within the constraints they’re operating under, and they move on to the next story.

This isn’t a moral failing of individual journalists. This is a structural problem with a media system owned by billionaires and beholden to shareholders.

As Noam Chomsky documented in his work on “manufacturing consent,” media organizations don’t need explicit directives from their corporate owners to self-censor. The economic structure does the work automatically. When your salary depends on not making your bosses nervous, you learn to avoid stories that might.

What This Means

Trump’s two-step strategy—bully journalists into fear, then bury them under information—is working exactly as intended.

The Epstein files should be a Category 5 political scandal, dominating the news for weeks. Investigative teams should be poring over every page and congressional hearings should be convened.

Instead, we got 48 hours of cautious, hedged coverage before everyone moved on.

Everyone, that is, except independent media.

While ABC and CNN moved on to Grammy previews, outlets like DropSite News, Democracy Now, and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo kept digging. They’re actually reading the documents, connecting the dots, and doing the work.

Independent outlets—like NOTICE News—can do this because we can’t be bullied the same way. DropSite doesn’t answer to Disney. Democracy Now doesn’t fear advertiser backlash. Zeteo isn’t protecting quarterly earnings. You can sue me, but I’ve got nothing but student debt to my name!

This is the crack in Trump’s plan. He can intimidate corporate newsrooms, but he can’t stop an entire ecosystem of independent journalists funded by readers who specifically want someone to fight back.

The truth will come out. The question is whether we’ll support the people doing that work.

Corporate media won’t save us. But independent media will—if we let them.