The Dangers of Selective Coverage: Don’t Leave the Maxwell Trial on Mute
What kinds of things slip by, unnoticed, due to the workings of selective coverage within the corporate media apparatus?
The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the well known Jeffrey Epstein confidant who played an integral role in aiding and facilitating Epstein’s global sex trafficking ring— something that implicates countless global elites and major intelligence agencies— is proceeding into its second week.
Sadly, yet without much, if any, surprise, coverage of what is one of the most important trials in history has been sparse among the corporate media. Seriously, a trial that involves mind-boggling amounts of recognizable names ranging from politicians, business tycoons, and celebrities is being censored via selective coverage.
The climate of “the news” these days, with all that appears to be happening in the whirlwind of the wide-reaching online public sphere, makes it difficult for ordinary people to track the most important stories; not the stories charged with the most popular buzz, but those with genuine and significant importance to normal people. Selective coverage from the corporate media— those legacy outlets supposedly responsible for keeping the public responsibly informed— has really done a number on how little daylight this trial is seeing in the public consciousness comparative to the magnitude of it.
Chances are pretty high that a typical “news” consumer has been assaulted with the surplus of earwax and the tie-it-yourself blindfolds that have become characteristic of the entertainment genre of “cable news.” In other words, the likelihood that consumers have been distracted with Omicron discussions, culture war debates, or January 6 outrage (almost one long-winded year later)— rather than the Maxwell trial— is pretty much a sure bet.
A Google search will turn up coverage from some outlets, and a nosey reader, perhaps with the free time of a retiree, may be able to sniff out a story here and there, but that is a sorry excuse for “coverage.” The biggest story in the world right now is owed much more than a few stories here and there with vague, dumbed-down interpretations of a very vast sea of murky waters.
In the lead-up to the trial, legacy outlets, through the horrid frontier of Op-Ed pages, were muddying the matter. The Spectator published a piece suggesting that some sympathy should be felt for Maxwell (that came from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s sister). There was also Rolling Stone trying to detail how those who knew her are distrustful of the sordid image of Maxwell being painted because it just doesn’t sound like her or, as one former worker for Epstein’s Palm Beach home said, she was more keen on “shopping on Worth Avenue, yes, not wandering around West Palm” scouting young women. Not only that, those interviewed for the Rolling Stone piece also claimed it was unfair that Maxwell was bearing the brunt of a punch that should have been intended for Epstein. . .
. . .And we all know what happened to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s growing apparent. In August of 2019, Emerson polling found that 45%— nearly half— of Americans don’t believe that Epstein killed himself in prison, a number that rose in the succeeding months.
Add to the sketchiness some more key facts— that Epstein was reportedly in “high spirits,” that those tasked with monitoring Epstein were sleeping and using their phones, and that the chief medical examiner responsible for the controversial Epstein autopsy resigned on the first day of Maxwell’s trial— and it gets so sketchy that one would think Edward Hopper or John Sloan scribbled it down.
. . .It’s not only that the corporate media has completely ignored this trial, but they also tried their best, as the corporate-funded arbiters of truth, to skew the perspective, to soften the blow of scorn evoked from this trial, and to keep the eyes of the masses away from the closest thing to justice being potentially served to the wickedly powerful.
This should rub all self-respecting, thoughtful, and intelligent Americans in all sorts of wrong ways, and the best way to combat this black bar of manufactured ignorance via selective coverage is to inform oneself, to lean in towards the truth as we deserve it, untainted.
Inner City Press has been doing great work covering this trial both on their site and on their Twitter, so check them out. So has The Free Press Report.
Of course, if you’re privy to the Epstein-Maxwell stuff, you may already be a follower of Whitney Webb and her work. If not, she’s got a good newsletter, podcast, and makes a good follow.
There’ll be more to come on this matter here, in this space, too.
In the mean time, think about this trial, but also think beyond it: What kinds of things slip by, unnoticed, through the workings of selective coverage within the corporate media apparatus?
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