Regrettably the media needs to publish what gets the most clicks; unfortunately what gets the most clicks these days is partisan stories that gets readers riled up.
That Panama leak story was also quickly "forgotten" by the MSM.
That Panama leak story was also quickly "forgotten" by the MSM.
It starts off like quirky satire, and then it morphs into actual lampooning of two specific real lawyers by name. They sued to suppress the movie and then lost. A journalist writing about the papers was killed in a car bomb.
Or I could sit quietly, write some code to enable more ad views on tech platform du jour, get paid bank, and complain about journalism on Hacker News with my free time between deploys. Guess which one I would choose?
The answer is that lots of humans like that sort of work.
It's because they believe in the work, find it interesting compared to other lines of work, or were inspired by other writers. They don't get into it for the money. They leave the profession or advance in position for the money.
Don't forget sued, which prevents many independent journalists from being as aggressive as they should be with the plutocratic class and large corporations in countries where murdering journalists is still verboten. If you don't have the legal resources (and insurance) of a major news organization behind you, good luck writing the type of stories that cause discomfort to the powerful.
https://www.propublica.org/article/terror-in-little-saigon-v...
If you confront the powerful, it often ends up being too little, too late, in terms of government protections.
or maybe you won't because you won't even know what you are missing out
not judging you, I program and sit in an office, but I can understand the magic of being in the middle of the pulse of the world. It is a world that I only look at as a bystander.
perhaps being a journalist is paid little because it is you are more alive, instead of programming the next punch-the-monkey, you are tracking the money that rich people hide, investigate the dark side, with that you basically "live longer"
Edit: I see down vote bots are in full effect.
What I specifically referred to is that programming a computer as a day job (for example as the poster said their job is optimizing ads for a website) is probably far less fulfilling than following and analyzing world events and doing journalism. That's all.
A long time ago I realized there’s nothing interesting about world events. Most will have little to no effect on me and most of it is just like one big reality show. I now actively avoid learning about world events and am much happier. I’d rather learn about events local to me or stories about people I may be able to relate to, and none of those really require journalists.
The things you can do with software and computers are far more interesting than reading about how corrupt some rich guy is. I don’t give a shit about him or his corruption.
Overall I am not sure what point are you trying to make. That today you feel happier as a programmer? Sure, good for you.
I am only calling out the naive and frankly childishly simplistic arguments made in this thread that state things along the line: "It must suck to be a journalist, thank god I program ads for a website"
I have come believe that jobs that are hard to do but don't pay well are such because are more fulfilling and people are willing to trade monetary remuneration for a more interesting line of work. Many people (and it seems that you feel that way too) take this as a critique of their choices: "No way that a job that pays less than what I do is more interesting! Especially not a journalist/teacher/policeman etc."
As long as people demand the click-bait only the ones that provide such content will survive. Let's thank our luck that it is not Infowars style clickbait, so some resemblance of sanity still remains.
FWIW the Panama papers have had a noticeable impact, especially where it matters most, clawing money back
Media is not inherently profitable, it's a loss leader whose ultimate product is influence and the manufacture of consent.
That said, this argument of giving people what they want is a weird one. It is like taking the easiest and the laziest route to profit. Also, there is a not insignificant population that still wants facts and not click baity nonsense. But media churns out click baits because it is easier and faster.
The headlines themselves are advertisements:
'potus said -shocking thing-' (click here so 'you' have something to say to reinforce 'your' shallow self delusions that 'you're' a savvy, worldly, knowledgeable person instead of talking about what actually matters: [poverty, addiction, gas prices, unemployment, stagnant wage growth, unionization, corruption, health care costs, etc]).
It's too common to treat the media as a homogeneous entity rather than a fractured and variable group.
As a journalist, you need impeccible sources and evidence to back your story up before you publish something like that.
No problem: just hire Fusion GPS to write a "dossier". A source so "impeccible" that you can write about it for years in spite of there being not a shred of truth in it.
Andrew is the Duke of York, not Prince of Wales - that's Charles.
(Although... I didn't know that, I wasn't really sure what Andrew's relation in position was to Charles)
Of course it would be a tricky story for any journalist, editor, or publisher to handle, not least due to Britain's plaintiff-friendly libel laws. But outlandish? Not at all.
'Outlandish' are things like Prince Andrew's claim that a war injury caused him to completely stop sweating for several years and that this provides a watertight* alibi against his accuser's allegations.
* I couldn't help myself
I also couldn't help myself. If you haven't been following the impeachment hearings:
Popular, he was murdered to be silenced from his handlers.
Unpopular, he is still alive and living somewhere in secret.
However if the meme was changed a little bit, even to "Who killed Epstein?" that would omit the 2nd more unpopular theory altogether.
I think the Epstein memes are definitely something people of every ideology enjoy.
> That the Epstein murder is our generations largest admission from the elite class that they not only exist but the rules definitely do not apply to them.
Couldn't agree more, thankfully the internet is throwing a wrench into the plan. Even if it's unclear that justice will ultimately be served.
> Ken "Popehat" White (previously) has expanded on his excellent Twitter thread about Jeffrey Epstein's suicide in jail, and just how (shamefully) normal it is for prisoners to die in custody due to indifference, overwork, malfeasance and sadism on the part of prison authorities.
> In the Atlantic, White tells the stories of 32 inmates who died (or nearly died) in US custody, under circumstances that are every bit as absurd and negligent as those surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's death.
> The point isn't that it's inconceivable that Epstein died as the result of a conspiracy, but the conspiracy theories that say that it has to be a setup because it's so implausible that prison authorities would be so totally useless are thoroughly disconnected from reality.
https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/malice-vs-incompetence.htm...
> A New York Times investigation published last year detailed this practice, under which federal prisons are so strapped for correctional officers that they regularly compel teachers, nurses, secretaries and other support staff members to step in. The practice has grown at some prisons as the Trump administration has curtailed the hiring of correctional officers.
> Many of these staff members only receive a few weeks’ training in correctional work, and, while required by contract to serve as substitutes, are often uncomfortable in the roles.
> Union officials said that for more than a year officials in Washington had been made aware of a severe staffing shortage at the facility in the wake of a federal hiring freeze. One of the guards on the unit where Mr. Epstein died had been working overtime for five straight days, while the other had been forced to work overtime that day, a union official said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/nyregion/epstein-barr.htm...
Here's another quote from Ken White, the criminal defense attorney I quoted above
> Jeffrey Epstein’s name and face are everywhere following his death. Even as an investigation reveals that the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he died, was terminally short-staffed and relied on untrained guards who failed to monitor him, conspiracy theories persist. Americans who believe in their justice system assert that it is obvious that he was murdered, and that jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide.
> Here, to help you evaluate that claim, are 32 short stories about in-custody deaths or near-deaths in America.
> These stories don’t mention Jeffrey Epstein, but they are about him. Epstein was incarcerated in the United States of America, and this is how the United States of America, the mightiest and richest nation there is or ever has been, treats incarcerated people. When you say, “There is no way that guards could be so reckless, so indifferent, so malicious as to just let someone as important as Epstein die,” this is how 32 Americans respond. Many, many more could respond in kind.
The whole thesis here is that what happened to Epstein could happen to anyone, but that's not true. Most people are not billionaires with 24-7 access to the best lawyers in the world and extraordinary leverage over some of the most powerful people in the world. The implicit subtext here is that Epstein is just another human that got chewed up in a system that's generally indifferent if not outright hostile to human life. But people in jail are not mindless components in a dysfunctional system. They still have agency and respond to incentives and are mostly intensely interested in each other, not least because of the inhospitality of the system. They have newspapers and TV in jail, and I very sure that everyone in there was very aware of who their new neighbor was.
When he died Epstein was in a cell in the Special Housing Unit for uncooperative prisoners. He clearly wasn't able to buy better treatment from the government. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/real-scand...)
> Jeffrey Epstein, inmate 76318-054, hated his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was cramped, dank and infested with vermin, so Mr. Epstein, long accustomed to using his wealth to play by his own rules, devised a way out.
> He paid numerous lawyers to visit the jail for as many as 12 hours a day, giving him the right to see them in a private meeting room ... he and his entourage regularly emptied the two vending machines of drinks and snacks.
> “It was shift work, all designed by someone who had infinite resources to try and get as much comfort as possible,” said a lawyer who was often in the jail visiting clients.
> Outside the meeting room, Mr. Epstein mounted a strategy to avoid being preyed upon by other inmates: He deposited money in their commissary accounts, according to a consultant who is often in the jail and speaks regularly with inmates there.
> But in his final days, Mr. Epstein’s efforts to lessen the misery of incarceration seemed to be faltering.
> He was seldom bathing, his hair and beard were unkempt and he was sleeping on the floor of his cell instead of on his bunk bed, according to people at the jail.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/nyregion/epstein-suicide-...
Like his 2008 prison sentence right?
As to heads rolling, the low-level guards in charge of watching Epstein are on unpaid leave and under investigation. The head of the Bureau of Prisons has been demoted to his previous job as the head of a department in the bureau of prisons. I wouldn't call that accountability.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/19/us/jeffrey-epstein-guard-char...
Not defending these people, mind you, or anyone involved. Just saying that either some shenanigans were afoot, or Epstein found himself at the center of an astonishing vortex of stupidity and carelessness, the likes of which is seldom seen in government or anywhere else. It's easier to imagine Barney Fife at Nuremberg.
Whether the people responsible were designated patsies or garden-variety lazy dumbasses, they are not in for a good time.
One of the articles that I linked to earlier in this thread is an interview with an academic who said she'd been trying to draw attention to the outrageous mistreatment of the detainees in that prison for years and thought it was really a shame that it took something happening to someone as famous as Epstein for it to be covered in the news.
All my point was was that you can't use the fact that he was treated outrageously badly by the guards to prove that it was a conspiracy. What happened to Epstein should be taken as a wake-up call for us to reform our judicial system.
You have to really contort all the information available in this case to see it as anything other than a massive cover up. People in the media going out of their way to claim it's a "conspiracy theory" should be held in utmost suspicion. Look at how ABC spiked the story of Epstein before it became public and how the other major networks have since played along. Including CBS firing the ABC whistle blower (who had since moved on to working with them) at ABC's request.
I don't know what Popehat's motives are for trying to cover this up further, but I bet he's friends with people who are implicated.
I found sources saying that guards were working 16-hour days and cutting corners regularly at the MCC (https://apnews.com/39ca1eb755914af8b273966c268a0a9b).
I couldn't find a source for your claim that no one else had committed suicide in the MCC in over ten years. Cite?
Sure, one successful suicide in 21 years:
https://nypost.com/2019/08/10/suicide-supposedly-nearly-impo...
Anyone leaving that bit of information out of their narrative is being willfully deceptive or is not informed enough to have an opinion they should be making public.
Furthermore, in general the NY Post is seen as a far-right tabloid and I couldn't find any more reputable source making the same claim. And they don't provide much detail about their claim, hedging by saying that they tried looking up news articles and didn't find any (as opposed to having a more conclusive source) and report that there were a "handful" of unsuccessful suicides while omitting any further details. If they were a more reputable publication I'd give them some benefit of the doubt, but given their track record I'd want them to cite their sources more explicitly.
Still, your point did make me realize that every article I've ready about poor suicide watch procedures used national statistics instead of statistics specific to the MCC. That is a serious weakness of those sources.
Cite:
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/12/jeffrey-epstein-su...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/epstein-new-york-lockup-suicides
Regardless, it seems as if suicide is not a common occurrence in this prison. Epstein was the highest profile prisoner on the planet. His suicide is not routine and it shouldn't be discounted to incompetence, especially while these reports ignore how difficult it is to actually commit suicide in this particular facility.