John Sexton co-founded the blog Verum Serum in 2005. Determined to be eclectic, he began writing about everything from cosmology to politics but has mostly narrowed it down to politics recently. Along with co-blogger Morgen Richmond he is to be featured in an upcoming documentary about the rise of new media and its effect on traditional journalism. He has a degree in Liberal Arts from Virginia Tech and is currently finishing a Masters in Science and Religion at Biola University.
John does freelance web design and photo restoration work from his home in Southern California. He is married and has three children.
This is what real journalism looks like, folks. Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes a 2,300 word piece about Newt Gingrich’s relationship to ethics charges (those brought by and against him) that ends with this rehash of his fall from grace:
In the end, nearly all of the charges were dismissed. But the ethics committee did find that Mr. Gingrich had used tax-exempt money to promote Republican goals, and given the panel inaccurate information for its inquiry.
Mr. Gingrich formally apologized, conceding he had brought discredit on the House. He had always regarded himself as a “transformative figure” who would change the course of history, but on Jan. 21, 1997, he made history in another way.
The House voted 395-28 to reprimand him and fine him $300,000, making him the first speaker ever disciplined for unethical conduct.
That’s it. That’s how the tale ends. It’s as if they’ve quoted Newt’s history but added an invisible ellipsis over the final portion of the story. This is a doctored quote of the record. This is “agenda journalism.”
Do you think it’s relevant that after the events described above Democrats campaigned for a further investigation? Is it relevant that the IRS took them up on it, and that after more than three years determined that Newt did nothing wrong? Simply put, all the charges, even the ones Newt was reprimanded for, were bogus. Is any of that worth mentioning in a front page story on the topic at the New York Times?
Type “Occupy anti-capitalist” into Google News and you’ll see a bunch of European news outlets returning results. You’ll have to search harder for instances of US papers referring to US occupiers as anti-capitalist. It happens, but rarely.
Here’s a sample of headlines and culled descriptions from papers in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Denmark. Notice that these are news stories not opinion pieces:
Daily Mail – Anti-capitalist demonstrators have constructed a ‘slum city’ made of wooden shacks on an historic civic green.
Daily Mail- Having resigned as Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s over its handling of the anti-capitalist protesters camped outside the cathedral, trendy vicar the Rev Dr Giles Fraser is enjoying his moment in the spotlight.
Guardian – ‘Occupy’ anti-capitalism protests spread around the world
Scotsman – EDINBURGH city council has been criticised after it pledged its backing to the anti-capitalist movement that has occupied St Andrew Square.
Huff Post UK – Occupy London: An Accountant By Day, An Anti-Capitalist By Night, Who Are The Protesters?
London Evening Standard- More than half of all planned school trips to St Paul’s Cathedral have been cancelled since anti-capitalist protesters set up camp last month.
AFP – Anti-capitalist activists formally opened their third London site Saturday, in a ceremony marking the transformation of a building owned by Swiss financial giant UBS into a “bank of ideas”.
Telegraph – Anti-capitalist protesters are locked in a legal battle with Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Mirror – St Paul’s Cathedral suspends legal action against anti-capitalist protesters
BBC – Anti capitalist protesters in Glasgow’s George Square have reached an agreement with the council over plans to relocate
BBC – Anti-capitalist demonstrations, inspired by the protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral, have taken root in a park in Brighton and in Bournemouth.
BBC – Anti-capitalist protesters camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London have said they are considering an offer to allow them to stay until 2012.
Wales Online – Police use old bylaw to sweep away anti-capitalist protesters’ camp in front of Cardiff Castle
Independent- The Lord Mayor’s Show passed off peacefully in London yesterday, despite the fear of disruption from anti-capitalist protesters.
The Local Switzerland – Police made a number of arrests on Tuesday morning as anti-capitalist protesters were evicted from a park in central Zurich.
Der Spiegel [Germany] – The “Occupy Germany” faction appears to be hoping for a kind of revitalization of the mass anti-capitalist movement seen in Germany that began around the turn of the century and culminated in the at times violent and often creative mass protests at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm in 2006.
Herald Sun [Australia] – About 60 anti-capitalist demonstrators set up overnight, with the lawn littered with tarps that are being used as makeshift beds.
El Watan [France] – Ils dénoncent sans ambages le capitalisme, les inégalités et les disparités économiques. [They unequivocally denounce capitalism, inequality and economic disparity.]
Le Monde [France] – Un nouveau signe du mouvement de protestation anti-capitaliste qui déferle sur toute l’Amérique? [A new sign of the anticapitalist protest movement that is sweeping across America?]
Le Matin [France] – Le mouvement anti-capitaliste «Occupy Wall Street» veut se muer en marque. [The anti-capitalist movement "Occupy Wall Street" will be turned into brand.]
Arbejder[Denmark's communist news] – I New York havde myndighederne truet med at ville rydde Zuccotti-parken, som de anti-kapitalistiske aktivister har besat de sidste tre uger… [In New York authorities had threatened to would clear Zuccotti Park, as the anti-capitalist activists have occupied the last three weeks...]
By contrast, US papers have rarely applied the term anti-capitalist to the protests, even when the term has appeared in print it is often frowned upon by the author.
A woman who attended Occupy Cleveland last Saturday is now saying she was raped by a man she shared a tent with. Police are investigating the allegation, but in the meantime the local NBC station has produced this outrageous report on the situation:
According to reporter Tom Beres, the big question is: “how much damage this will do to all the work that has been done and the future of the occupation.” Really? Is that the big question or is it “Was this woman raped and if so by whom? The report gets worse from there. Here’s Beres’s narration:
Occupy Cleveland’s tent city, a colony of protesters challenging Wall Street greed and a political system that helps the rich…
After a recitation of the charges and what amounts to a denial by organizers, i.e. we don’t make sleeping assingments, the report goes completely off the rails. We get a reaction from someone who isn’t named and reportedly isn’t part of the protest but is “familiar” with it:
I don’t believe any of these guys would do anything like that there. So I think someone probably brought her here, set her here and to spend the night and hang out with them for one day just to say she was raped.
Look, maybe the producers of this segment could justify some kind of character witness for the protesters saying he believes these are good people. Unfortunately, they let this individual go a lot further than that. He insinuates the girl is a liar and part of a conspiracy to discredit them. And without any clarification or reaction, that’s where Tom Beres wraps it up:
So again the question, how much damage will this ugly allegation do?
This is from last Friday, but I just came across it. Here we have a supposedly respectable commentator on MSNBC suggesting it’s time for “radical solutions” to our current economic crisis. It may be that Matthews is talking about a new CWA type stimulus program, but listen as he compares our current situation to the Revolutionary War and the abolition of slavery which of course led to the Civil War:
Here’s the full text:
Radical. Normally, we don’t like that word. Normally, we like our politics somewhere near the center – somewhere between progressive and conservative. You get beyond that and people consider you troubling, at best, dangerous, at worst.
Radical positions. Radical solutions. Radical politics. Normally, as I said, not the stuff most people are comfortable with.But there comes a time when the positions, solutions and politics of normal times don’t seem to be working, or to be more exact: aren’t working!
We have a 9-plus percent jobless rate. People are not getting hired, not being put to work the way they need to. The normal forces are not solving their problems. Corporations are not hiring; they’re investing overseas or finding automated ways to get work done.
We’ve got a housing situation today that isn’t getting fixed. Older people are unable to sell homes they don’t need. Young people are having a very rough time getting mortgages and finding a house they can afford. Here again, the normal forces of supply and demand are not getting houses priced to sell, which mean priced to be bought.
Not everyone is getting hurt by all this, certainly not equally. The oil companies have made huge profits. So have many in the financial community.
And millions have been hurt. They’re hurting more each month as the hunt for work grows into years, as the corporations – who we’re told by one Republican presidential nominee are “really just people like us” – continue to find ways to make profits without offering people in this country real full-time jobs.
So people with brains, and a sense of history, begin to think about solutions to our problems, that arise beyond the normal list of progressive or conservative tools we’ve used to fix problems.
So we have to listen to the arguments being made down there on Wall Street. Radical solutions are sometimes the right solutions. Think of American independence. Thomas Paine was right. We had to cut off our ties with England pure and simple. Think of abolition. The only right way to deal with American slavery was to ban it outright – not negotiate with the slavers.
How long, exactly, should we continue with policies that leave so many out of work, without the dignity and vitality of a job to go to? How long do we let our economy shrink right there in front of us?
We may, as a society, have to take direct action to put people to work. If the corporations aren’t coming to our rescue, why “isn’t” the government?
All of this is playing off the protests in the street where organizers are calling for what? Revolution. Again, Matthews isn’t saying he wants violence in the streets, but the two examples he cites as precedent both happen to have involved major wars, i.e. the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. If all Matthews had in mind was a new CWA, why not say that. Why bring up these bloody examples as precedent?
Author Joe McGinniss had months of advance media interest and a huge rollout from well-heeled Random House which included appearances on NBC’s Today, CNN’s Piers Morgan and ABC’s “The View.” And yet, newly released figures show his book is languishing on shelves:
According to industry sales numbers reported today from Nielsen Bookscan, the most reliable tracker for the book industry, “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin” by Joe McGinniss sold a total of just 6,034 copies in the first week. Warehouse sales were also slow for “The Rogue,” with Ingram inventory barely dropping at all the first three days this week.
The geographic breakdown is interesting as well:
According to Nielsen Bookscan, “The Rogue” did best in the Pacific U.S. region in its first week, with 1,553 units sold. That region encompasses Alaska, where Palin lives and formerly served as governor.
In the Northeast, which includes New York and is a region where big national books often do best, “The Rogue” sold just 442 copies in the first week.
Technically it was six days, but New York City has seven million people. Selling 442 copies of a book with this level of media awareness is a major flop.
Yesterday Michelle Goldberg reported on the Glenn Beck event in Israel. Well, reporting is probably too strong a word. It’s a rambling post which states a great many liberal verities about Beck without even offering proof for them. I immediately found myself wondering if Goldberg was on vacation or if NewsBeast had actually send her overseas to “report” on Beck? It’s not clear. In any case, toward the end of her article she inserts this telling little vignette, bold my emphasis:
On Tuesday I stood with a mixed group of Americans and Israelis, most of us Jewish, looking at the site of Beck’s final rally…Looking at the site, my colleagues traded wry quips about Beck’s messianic metamorphosis. As they did, a white-haired American woman admonished us. “If you want war, continue to listen to this,” she said. “But he”—Beck—“is only for peace. And we don’t follow him—we follow Jesus.”
So Goldberg’s “mixed group” of like-minded liberals were standing around trash-talking Beck loudly enough that strangers passing by noted it and responded. The response is brief but to the point, i.e. Beck is not a messiah to us, just someone we admire. This completely undercuts the thesis of Goldberg’s article, but rather than report that her thesis may not sit with the facts, she and her group proceed to argue with the white haired lady and her friends.
She was with three other people, and soon we were having an animated argument. The Israelis were particularly impassioned, and the Americans didn’t quite believe that they were actually Jewish.
Goldberg is literally arguing with those she is there to write about. What’s wrong with this picture? The Israelis (who were with Goldberg) become “particularly impassioned” which sounds like a nice way of saying they yelled at the old ladies. About what exactly? Goldberg doesn’t say. At some point the noise attracts a tour guide of sorts:
Suddenly, a publicist named Ari Morgenstern appeared. He’s a spokesman for Christians United for Israel, but is helping Beck with the rally. After determining there were reporters among us, he whisked the foursome away, saying, “We’re asking all journalists not to bother people on the Glenn Beck tour.”
According to Cenk, his numbers at MSNBC were good but the management expressed other concerns. Or perhaps the more accurate way to say it is, the management relayed the concerns of others.
This comes in two parts. I’m going to highlight the details that seem significant, but feel free to listen to the whole thing. First, Cenk describes being called in by Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC. People “in Washington” have a problem with his tone. Scroll to about 3:27 in this clip and listen to the next 90 seconds, up through the part about having more Republicans on his show:
Now at this point, it’s not clear what the issue is. MSNBC’’s Phil Griffin has heard from “people in Washington” and they’ve asked him to tone it down. Are these people complaining about the show conservatives or progressives? It’s not clear. But if you jump over to this account of the same story in the NY Times, it’s a bit clearer:
In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and “that you need to act like it.”
MSNBC is home to many hosts who criticize President Obama and other Democrats from a progressive point of view, but at times Mr. Uygur could be especially harsh.
When I caught the President talking about President Lincoln’s “intercontinental railroad” in an interview he gave in February, I thought it was just an off-the-cuff gaffe. But it turns out his former chief political adviser made the same mistake just this weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival:
It’s not surprising that both men would occasionally misspeak. It is surprising that both would use the same example, i.e. Lincoln’s “intercontinental railroad” as an example of big government stimulus spending, and make the same verbal gaffe while doing so.
You have to wonder if both the President and Axelrod got the same talking points memo from someone at the Center for American Progress or another friendly progressive think tank. And assuming they did get the handy political illustration from a common source, you have to wonder why neither of them caught the error (replacing transcontinental with intercontinental).
What’s certain is that this is just the kind of gaffe that the left would have had a field day with if Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin, or really anyone on the right, had made it. We have several recent examples of just this kind of gaffe becoming big news.
Politifact fact-checked Palin’s account of Paul Revere’s ride. So are they going to set the record straight on the transcontinental railroad? George Stephanopoulos went after Michele Bachmann’s account of the founding fathers and slavery. Is he going to question someone at the White House about this gaffe now that it has popped up twice? Will Chris Matthews suggest on air that the President is really a “balloon head?”
Jon Stewart recently claimed on Fox News that the media was not partisan, just lazy. I thought I’d offer him an example to the contrary. This could be a continuing series, but I’ll start with one glaring example. Pay attention, Jon, this is for your own good.
On Monday, Michele Bachmann officially announced her candidacy for President. After the announcement she gave an interview to Fox in which she claimed that John Wayne was from Waterloo, IA. You’ve heard this story, right? Turns out The Duke’s parents had met in Waterloo but he grew up a few towns over in Winterset. Okay, it’s a minor mistake, fair enough.
Only some wag noticed that John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer, had spent a few years in Waterloo. He didn’t grow up there or commit his infamous murder spree there, but he was there for a couple years. A narrative quickly emerged, based on nothing except the fact that it was amusing, that Michele Bachmann had confused one John Wayne for the other. The media immediately began reporting this invented story as a fact:
Do they really believe that Michele Bachmann was talking about Gacy? Did she quickly scan Google and get confused as this video clip claims or is that an invented detail to support the invented story? Well, Bachmann denied that she was speaking about Gacy and Gacy wasn’t born or raised in Iowa. He grew up in Chicago. Plus he’s not exactly a role model. Bachmann was clearly talking about The Duke not the mass murderer.
But the joke/story that she had confused the two John Wayne’s was repeated in nearly 800 “news” articles. That doesn’t include the thousands of blogs that wrote about it. Was it true? Probably not, but it got saturation coverage on the day of her announcement. Liberals were obviously enjoying themselves at her expense.
Now compare the treatment of Bachmann to the press’ handling of another gaffe just a few days earlier.
Jim Treacher posted this great clip on Twitter. Watch as Cenk Uygur of MSNBC tells his audience how pathetic Andrew Breitbart is, and by extension all the bloggers who believed the Weinergate story.
Olbermann was a loudmouth misogynist but he wasn’t dumb. Maddow is mostly a predictable hack, but she’s whip smart. Even Ed Schultz, though he’s an obnoxious blowhard, occasionally has an opinion that comes from his own brain, not the left’s conventional wisdom. Jon Stewart, who is really the left’s news anchor of choice, is both smart and often genuinely funny.
But as you can see in the clip above, Cenk has all of their failings and none of their gifts. He’s a hack and a condescending blowhard but makes up for it by being a colossal dunce. His only charm is a lunkhead fratboy quality reminiscent of Belushi’s “John Blutarsky” from Animal House or possibly “Meat” from Porky’s.
His name is Lee Fang and he specializes in splashy claims that sound great but frequently turn out to be completely false or very nearly so. Last October his splash was that the pro-business Chamber of Commerce was taking foreign money to influence US elections.
It was just what the Dems needed, a ready-made villain to rile up the base. And sure enough, everyone jumped on board. President Obama’s chief adviser David Axelrod pimped the story and the DNC quickly (maybe too quickly) produced an ad repeating Fang’s juicy “secret foreign money” line:
Everyone from the NY Times on down looked into Fang’s claim and pronounced it specious, but the left needed something to talk about other than their dim election prospects. The Chamber story sucked all the oxygen out of the room for a few news cycles and then, having served its purpose, it receded back into the fever swamp of paid progressive blogging from which it came.
Ellisa Martinez, who made false threats against Broward county schools last year after watching an episode of Rachel Maddow’s television show, has pled guilty in federal court and faces up to five years in prison.
I wrote about this story last November but it’s worth recapping again. A day after Rachel Maddow played (and replayed) a clip of Florida talk radio host Joyce Kaufman on her show, Ellisa Martinez sent a letter feigning support for Kaufman and 2nd amendment rights. The letter went on to suggest there would be a school shooting in coming days. Martinez then upped the ante by calling Kaufman’s radio show and telling listeners that her husband was on the rampage with several loaded weapons and would turn up at a local school that day unless she could talk him out of it.
In fact, none of this was true. It was one woman’s crazy attempt at making a political point after being offended by a carefully edited clip she’d seen on Maddow’s show. However the result of this prank was no joke. There was a massive lockdown of 300 schools in Broward county Florida and several government buildings which lasted most of a day. Parents throughout the county were frightened, not knowing which school the armed madman might visit.
I know what you’re thinking. This is news? But this statistical study covers 50 years of the Times‘ history from 1946-1997. Here’s what author Riccardo Puglisi found:
The main finding is that the Times displays a Democratic partisanship, with some anti-incumbent aspects. This is the case, because there are systematically more stories about civil rights, health care, labour and social welfare during the presidential campaign, but only so when the incumbent president is a Republican. The Democratic partisanship hypothesis is con rmed by the fact that (during presidential campaigns) there is no countervailing variation in the count of stories about defense, law & crime and foreign trade. As broadly confirmed by Gallup and NES polls, these issues are more favorable to the Republican party.
In other words the Times’ story selection during campaigns significantly favor those themes which are seen as Democratic issues. However, no such anti-incumbent bias is present when the incumbent President is a Democrat. The size of the bump is significant too:
… when the incumbent president is a Republican there are on average about 26 percent more stories about Democratic topics as the presidential campaign starts. In the case of domestic stories, the e ect amounts to 23 percent more stories as the campaign starts.
But the Times’ bias towards Democratic Presidents doesn’t stop with the campaign:
As expected, the first line of defense against the budget cuts proposed by Paul Ryan will be to demagogue the issue of Medicare cuts. Ryan’s budget essentially turns the system into a subsidy for premiums. Over on MSNBC, Cenk Uygur is so busy demagoguing he can’t even parse what “premium support” means. Listen to how he talks about this.
Cenk, let me explain something to you since you seem to be struggling here. Insurance is not like gasoline. The money that people pay to insurers is referred to as a “premium.” This is not meant as a rating of the octane in their coverage. It’s not like people have a choice between paying a premium or a regular. No. Whatever level of coverage they choose, their payment is called a premium.
The Washington Post deserves credit for letting some embarrassing material slip into this story about Media Matter’s efforts to train progressives for TV appearances:
The morning was dominated by a PowerPoint presentation by Drew Westen, the Democratic message guru and author of “The Political Brain.” Westen, wearing a boxy jacket, glasses and suspenders, showed examples of the right’s genius for branding (from “government takeover” to “death taxes”) and the left’s relative ineptitude. Westen said that the tea party’s “populist message, tinged with racism” was effective …
Notice that’s in quotes:
As Brenner sipped tea, Westen pontificated about the similarities between human and sheep brains and then conducted some psychological experiments on the class to demonstrate “a heightened state of latent activation in your brain.” To emphasize the point, he played a Fox News clip, showing anchor Shepard Smith accidentally referencing a sex act in a segment about Jennifer Lopez.
Here’s the clip they’re talking about:
Back to the story:
As the class chirped, Westen observed that while “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” the clip revealed that certain words and images triggered powerful, and usually unspoken, thoughts in the viewer’s mind.
Wait … you mean J-Lo music videos make men think about sex?! Wow, what a brilliant insight.
On Saturday, a man broke into the home of an Israeli settler family and murdered them all with a knife. There were three children in the home including an infant girl. A three year old boy still had a pulse when rescuers arrived but could not be resuscitated. Israel announced it was looking for the terrorist responsible and began a major house to house search for the perpetrator.
CNN covered the attack but refused to call this grisly crime what it was:
Notice the scare quotes around the phrase “terror attack.” And the story itself stuck with that approach:
Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a ‘terror attack.’
Apparently CNN wants to leave open the possibility that this grisly murder was a random crime or a robbery gone bad? Now Israel is demanding an apology.
The folks who warned us John McCain would die of cancer in office are back. This time they are targeting the Koch brothers with an 8-part film series designed to warm the hearts of liberal paranoiacs everywhere. Step one seems to be to beg for money. Instead of a tote bag, those who donate get a custom designed Shepard Fairey t-shirt:
The world-controlling-octopus has a long, ugly history in political cartoons going back to the 1930s:
A couple months ago I wrote a piece about RT (formerly Russia Today) titled, Mr. Putin Tear Down this Network. It seems Hillary Clinton has reached much the same conclusion. Note, this clip comes from RT itself, which seems quite pleased to be a target of Hillary’s opprobrium:
On the one hand, you could argue that the rise of channels like RT has a lot in common with the rise of blogs and other new media outlets. Both are filling a space created by the technological leveling of the playing field between old and new media. Both offer opinion mixed with fact.
Here’s the difference as I see it: Bloggers write from a position of principle not of power. In Glenn Reynold’s memorable phrase, we’re an Army of Davids. So, for instance, my own support for free markets comes from my own consideration of what is best for the nation and the world, not from my desire to maintain my dominant position in the marketplace.
The same can not be said for RT. RT is essentially a glossy brochure for Putin’s strongman statism. Lots of attractive presenters with no idea what they are talking about. With a few rare exceptions, everything they pump out is designed to present America as a failure and thereby subtly suggest that, hey, maybe things aren’t so bad in dear old Russia. Honestly, even the idea of a Kremlin network is obscene when you consider the number of reporters who’ve been murdered for criticizing the powers that be in Russia.
Here at Big Journalism we’re pretty tough on the media when they behave badly, but we also try to offer kudos where they are deserved, even if that’s only with benefit of hindsight.
Yesterday I pointed out that three high profile network newspeople–Katie Couric of CBS, George Stephanopoulos of ABC, and Charlie Rose of PBS–had attended a party at the New York home of a convicted sex offender named Jeffrey Epstein. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, suffice it to say that Epstein isn’t your average offender. He’s a billionaire money manager who was accused of paying more than 40 teenage girls for sexual favors and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, transporting at least one teenager around the world as a party favor for his adult friends. Thanks to a plea deal offered by the FBI, he spent less than 18 months in jail.
As a father of two daughters, this is the kind of thing that gets me upset. It’s even more upsetting that reporters who should know better continue to treat him like a respectable member of high society. So yesterday I sent out tweets to the three news people who attended the party, asking them if they had any comment and/or explanation for their decision to socialize with a convicted sex offender. Late yesterday afternoon I received a message from Katie Couric in response. Because her response was made via a private channel, I believe she has an expectation of privacy. However I can characterize what she said as a sincere expression of regret. I still think Couric deserves criticism for attending the party, but she also deserves credit for not ducking the issue now that she has the benefit of hindsight.
“Jeffrey is a monster.” That’s how 27 year old Virginia Roberts describes convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and she should know. Virginia is now a married mother of three living in Australia but 12 years ago, when she was just 15, she was groomed by Epstein as his personal sexual assistant and traveling companion.
Epstein
Last week Mrs. Roberts, who had been identified in court documents only as “Jane Doe 102,” saw pictures of Epstein walking free with Prince Andrew and got angry. She decided to break her silence and told her story over several days to the Daily Mail. You can read many of the gritty details of her time with Epstein here, but the bottom line is simple: Epstein trained Roberts as his personal “erotic masseuse” from the time she was 15 and then, while she was still underage, began flying her to his private island in the Caribbean for sex with his friends. In other words, he was acting as a pimp to a child prostitute.
Epstein, who is a billionaire money manager (hence the private island and private jet), faced dozens of counts of paying for sex with underage girls five years ago but avoided trial when the FBI stepped in and offered him a sweetheart plea bargain. No one involved understands why he was offered the deal, since the details of the charges against him were quite shocking. The Daily Beast recently reported that Epstein flew underage girls in from around the world, including three 12 year olds selected from France as a birthday present to himself. These are crimes for which an ordinary person could see several decades in prison. But under the FBI deal, Esptein spent about 18 months in jail (some of that in work release). Some have suggested that Epstein’s personal relationships with people like Bill Clinton (who has also flown on Epstein’s jet) and Prince Andrew may have helped him get a light sentence.
Normally, being a convicted sex offender would ruin your social life; not so for Jeffrey Epstein. Buried in this weekend’s story about Virginia Roberts was mention of a party Epstein had thrown in December for his pal Prince Andrew. On the guest list: Woody Allen, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopolous and Katie Couric. Now I can figure out what Woody Allen and Epstein might have in common, but why were Rose, Stephanopolous and Couric there? According to this story, they were all having a fine time begging Prince Andrew for invitations to the Royal Wedding. Priorities, I guess.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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