Editorials from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and others

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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July 18 – The Washington Post says conspiracy theories abound when the government misleads

For decades, the CIA downplayed the extent of its knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Documents newly unearthed by a House task force prove that a case officer with the alias “Howard” – whose real name was George Joannides – managed a Cuban group that interacted with Oswald. The CIA had repeatedly insisted that Howard did not exist.

The Post’s Tom Jackman reported this week that Oswald approached the CIA-backed group that opposed Fidel Castro and secretly offered his help three months before the assassination. Alas, the striking revelations – once dismissed as baseless conspiracy theories – were overshadowed by a public spat between President Donald Trump and his MAGA base over the administration’s announcement that it would not release files about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

These two stories aren’t entirely unrelated. Government misdirection has contributed to a collapse of public trust in its institutions. So has a decade of relentless attacks by Trump on the “deep state.” Squandered credibility makes it hard for the Justice Department or the intelligence community to persuade skeptical Americans that there’s nothing more to share about Epstein’s dealings with powerful figures, including Trump.

This week exposed the limits of even Trump’s ability to tell his base what to think. The president on Thursday directed the Justice Department to ask a judge to release “all pertinent” grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. He did so shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump contributed a doodle of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album in 2003. “May every day be another wonderful secret,” the future president purportedly wrote, though Trump denies it.

Trump’s reversal came a day after he called the Epstein saga a “hoax” and lashed out at supporters seeking to learn more. But the grand jury testimony – which he knows a judge might not even unseal – would represent a fraction of the evidence that investigators gathered. For example, it probably wouldn’t include Trump’s reported Epstein birthday letter.

Americans are understandably suspicious. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week found that 69 percent of Americans think the federal government is hiding details about Epstein’s clients. A CNN poll this month found only 3 percent of Americans are satisfied with the information the government put out about the case.

The Justice Department has good reason to refrain from releasing raw investigative information, in the Epstein case or any other. Prosecutors risk smearing people who are incidentally mentioned in files or for whom there was insufficient evidence to charge with crimes. There’s also a public interest in protecting victim privacy.

That is why Trump officials should not have fanned the Epstein conspiracy theories to begin with. Now, they are reaping what they sowed. In 2019, after Epstein’s death in federal custody, which was ruled a suicide, Trump retweeted a claim that Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.” Conservative influencers were given binders during a White House visit this February purporting to be the ” first phrase ” of the Epstein files. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in May that there are “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” She had also indicated that Epstein’s client list was sitting on her desk for review. Now, her spokespeople say no such list exists.

America’s paranoid style of politics is nothing new. Over the decades, elites failed Americans enough times to produce a crisis of faith in government rooted in real-world examples. The Pentagon Papers exposed a pattern of lies about the Vietnam War, during which 58,220 Americans died. Watergate showed a conspiracy that really did go all the way to the top.

When Oswald killed Kennedy, three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing at least most of the time. Since 2007, that number has never been higher than 30 percent. The U.S. preemptively invaded Iraq based on cherry-picked intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. Trump’s 2016 victory was partly a response to these and other failures.

In 2020, a group of 51 former intelligence officials shredded their credibility by signing a public letter insisting the release of Hunter Biden’s emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The laptop that contained them was authentic. Joe Biden’s campaign knew that when it pressured social media companies to suppress stories about its damaging contents. These same operatives also covered up Biden’s decline in hopes of winning in 2024.

Not every paranoid fantasy that gains traction on the internet is true, and the Justice Department should not release investigative files willy-nilly to satisfy the conspiracy theorists. Even if the full Epstein file were opened and revealed nothing of interest to the public, it probably would not deter fabulists from spinning new theories.

But Americans would not be so receptive to such theorizing had elite institutions avoided some of their spectacular stumbles – or if U.S. leaders refrained from amplifying them. The government’s long-term challenge is to rebuild trust with the public. At the moment, too many officials are eroding it further.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/19/epstein-trump-jfk-cia-conspiracy/

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July 22 – The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Trump, conspiracy theories and the Epstein case

When you consider all the damnable behavior that congressional Republicans have meekly accepted from President Donald Trump – his frequent and blatant constitutional violations, his deranged cabinet appointments, his reckless dismantling of much of the federal government, and most of all what should have been the permanently disqualifying abomination of Jan. 6, 2021 – it’s ironic that the offense that finally shakes them from their sycophantic stupor and drives them to stand and challenge Trump revolves around what is very likely a fantasy.

All serious indications are that the “client list” of powerful men who the late wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein supposedly supplied with young girls doesn’t actually exist. At least, that’s the official conclusion of Trump’s own Justice Department, which also concludes that Epstein’s 2019 jail cell death was in fact suicide and not murder.

But don’t try telling that to the more dedicated disciples in Trump’s MAGA movement, including those in Congress. Their open fury at the Trump administration’s foot-dragging in releasing documents from the Epstein criminal case is a remarkable bit of schadenfreude, given Trump’s central role in spreading the conspiracy theory that he now cannot get his followers to release from their clenched jaws.

Good. Our conspiracist-in-chief richly deserves this unprecedented revolt. Trump is likely incapable of learning responsibility from even this startling blowup, but let it be a lesson to others who would weaponize dystopian lies for the sake of power, as Trump has done throughout his political career.

The most lie-prone president in America’s history has never limited his lies to pedestrian topics like election validity. Lie-wise, Trump has always reached for the stars. Or rather, the gutter.

His successful 2016 election campaign was built largely on the racist lie that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America. It was aided by his xenophobic lie of a violent crime wave by undocumented immigrants.

The list of loopy allegations Trump has made or promoted goes on and on: that the father of GOP primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz was involved in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; that a Democratic Party staffer was murdered in connection with Hillary Clinton’s email controversy; that a pizza parlor was headquarters for a pedophilia ring that included the Clintons. And on. And on. And on.

Trump’s role in spreading the Epstein conspiracy theory was especially nervy, because it always had the potential to blow up in his face.

Yes, Epstein was known to pal around with Bill Clinton in the past. That created an apparently irresistible (if baseless) tale for Trump to promote after Epstein was found dead in his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges: that it was actually murder, committed to prevent him from blackmailing powerful people, potentially including (goes the discredited theory) Clinton.

The problem is that Trump himself was one of those powerful people, cavorting with Epstein at various lavish properties back in the day. Trump told an interviewer in 2002 that Epstein is a “terrific guy” who “is a lot of fun to be with,” adding: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Despite that hypocritical element, Trump pushed the Epstein murder conspiracy theory during last year’s campaign, promising to release classified documents if he was elected. As recently as February, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, told an interviewer that an Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now” awaiting review and public release.

But the Justice Department and the FBI recently signed off on a memo concluding there was no such list and no evidence Epstein was murdered. Then Bondi backtracked from her earlier “on my desk right now” comment and said there was actually no “client list” at all, and that she’d early been referring only to the general file in the criminal case.

As the MAGA faithful who’d bought into Trump’s earlier conspiracy-mongering cried foul, Trump and his gang reverted to form by offering up (what else?) different conspiracy theories.

Trump has dusted off his old fake claim that Obama conspired to manipulate intelligence related to Russia in order to throw the 2016 election – augmenting the claim this time with an AI-generated video showing Obama being arrested. Bondi has released a report related to that other empty-suit controversy, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 emails.

Trump has even demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Redskins, an offering of culture-war candy that is an obvious attempt to distract his followers off the Epstein story, already.

It doesn’t seem to be working. On that point, we find ourselves in rare agreement with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and other MAGA members of Congress who are demanding that the Epstein files be opened to the public. Not because we think the mythical client list is within, but because if it isn’t (and it probably isn’t), that might finally wake up Trump’s followers to the fact that he’s been lying to them all along – about this as about so much else.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_aa374cc3-2521-48ea-891f-b16942d885b4.html

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July 16 – The New York Times on the importance of local public radio and television

When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding. Police departments, the military, Medicare, Social Security and public education offer other examples.

So does public media, including PBS, NPR and their local affiliates. As newspapers and television stations across the country fold, public radio and TV stations can be among the few sources of local news in rural areas. During storms and floods, radio can be the sole source of information when electricity goes out. After floods in Kentucky this year, a listener in the city of Hazard who had been without power and cellphone service wrote to her local public radio station to thank it for being her lifeline. At its best, public media is a classic public service – something that provides large benefits and that the private sector often fails to provide.

Unfortunately, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have passed legislation to gut public media. The White House requested, through a process known as rescission, that Congress claw back the $1.1 billion it previously allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public media, for two years. The House and Senate approved the cuts this week.

Hundreds of cities and towns, especially those outside major metropolitan areas, will be affected. Nearly one in five NPR member stations could close down without federal funding, one analysis found. Listeners in the Midwest, South and West will be the hardest hit, becoming less informed about their communities. An NPR station in Petersburg, Alaska, which was the subject of a recent episode of the Times podcast “The Daily,” is an example: It and a station run by a local Lutheran church are the only radio stations that residents reliably receive. It gets 30 percent of its funding from the federal government and will have to lay off most of its staff, if not shut down, without the money.

The cut will also hasten the decline of America’s once robust media ecosystem. The number of local journalists has declined by 75 percent since 2002, and a third of American counties don’t have a single full-time local journalist, a study this month found. The United States spends less per person on public media than other wealthy countries, but even that limited funding has helped make public radio a resilient part of local news. To abandon it is to accelerate a dangerous trend straining civic health.

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them. Yet the “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government, and it may have an easier time raising money from its many dedicated listeners if Congress punishes it.

The funding cutoff will damage valuable services that have little to do with ideology. Broadcasting local government meetings, as some public radio stations do, is neither liberal nor conservative. The same is true about public television shows like “Sesame Street” that help teach young children how to read and count. Local affiliates largely cover community and state issues that do not neatly fit national left-right divides, and they will suffer most. That’s one reason a number of conservative Republicans, such as Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, warned of the bill’s impact. (You can donate to your local stations through NPR’s and PBS’s websites.)

We are reminded of the excesses of the “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who have defunded public media.

The same applies to separate Republican plans for shrinking Voice of America, the government service that broadcasts in other countries. In some places, it is the only source of news that is not hostile to the United States or democracy. In China and Iran, residents who hear Voice of America get news and views that they may get nowhere else. Already, some networks that previously broadcast Voice of America have replaced it with Chinese state media, The Wall Street Journal reported. It is telling that supporters of the Chinese Communist Party are celebrating cuts to Voice of America.

Public media, like every other major institution, is imperfect. But it improves the lives of millions of Americans, and it strengthens American interests. It should not become yet another victim of our polarized political culture. People in Hazard and Petersburg, along with hundreds of other places, should not lose valuable public services because of partisan anger.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/opinion/pbs-npr-cuts-funding.html

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July 18 – The Wall Street Journal on the DOJ and an antitrust case against media companies

The Biden Administration stretched antitrust laws for political ends, and now the Trump crowd is doing the same. The latest exhibit is the Justice Department’s bizarre legal filing in a lawsuit (Children’s Health Defense v. WP Company) by anti-vaccine activists against media companies.

Children’s Health Defense-the anti-vaccine outfit that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously led-and like-minded plaintiffs claim the Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press and the BBC colluded with Big Tech companies to censor them. The platforms are unnamed alleged co-conspirators.

How did this supposed conspiracy work? Plaintiffs say the media companies joined an industry partnership around 2020 called the “Trusted News Initiative,” which shared misinformation on Covid, vaccines, elections and other matters. They claim the goal of this industry partnership was to undermine competitors with differing views.

They add that social-media platforms censored information at the direction of this media partnership. This is an illegal group boycott under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Or so their argument goes, which isn’t very far. Antitrust inquiries depend on facts and evidence. The plaintiffs don’t show that platforms censored them at the direction of the media partnership.

Media companies say they at most collectively decided what to count as misinformation, and the platforms made independent decisions. By the way, Children’s Health Defense accused Biden officials in a separate lawsuit of jaw-boning platforms to censor it. So who are the real censors behind the curtain-the media or government officials?

Another major problem with the lawsuit is that consumers don’t seem to have suffered harm. Consumer welfare has been the north star of antitrust law for 40 years because it provides an intelligible standard for determining what counts as anti-competitive conduct.

Plaintiffs say internet users were deprived of diverse viewpoints and that some of their censored posts-e.g., on natural immunity, social distancing and the virus’s origins-weren’t erroneous. But many were. Internet users could still find diverse views about such subjects in other places, including in these pages.

None of this matters, according to the Justice Department’s “statement of interest.” DOJ isn’t taking a side in the case, but it endorses the plaintiff argument that the Sherman Act protects competition in “viewpoint diversity,” which apparently includes false statements about vaccines.

Justice claims that antitrust laws bar even “tacit” collusive agreements, which can involve merely a “‘wink and a nod’ or an informal ‘gentleman’s agreement or understanding.'” Under this standard, the media coverup of Joe Biden ‘s decline could be an antitrust violation.

One irony is that Biden officials threatened big digital platforms with antitrust regulation if they didn’t censor alleged misinformation. The Trump DOJ is doing the reverse. Its legal filing threatens platforms with antitrust liability if they take down content for whatever reason because doing so would suppress viewpoint competition.

DOJ cites a concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas observing that “we will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.” According to DOJ, “this is such a case.” No, it’s not.

Justice’s brief looks to be trying to extend the High Court’s 1945 precedent Associated Press v. U.S. The Justices then held that AP’s prohibition on its members selling content to non-members violated the Sherman Act, and that the First Amendment doesn’t shield media companies from antitrust liability.

The precedent is inapt, not least because the media landscape then was different with far fewer news sources. The AP’s alleged antitrust violation also involved discrimination against non-members for commercial reasons rather than viewpoint. The latter is protected by the First Amendment.

DOJ says a court’s antitrust analysis can “account for impacts on the content, diversity, and quality of news.” This would give judges enormous power over speech and the press. Does the Trump team really believe judges should decide what counts as “quality” news? It’s a strange argument that would weaken the First Amendment in the name of expanding speech.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/childrens-health-defense-v-wp-company-trusted-health-initiative-doj-antitrust-vaccines-b84135b7?mod=editorials_article_pos10

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July – The Guardian on Trump and Epstein

Donald Trump has thrived on conspiracy theories – “birtherist” lies that Barack Obama was born outside the US; the lunacies of the Q-Anon movement; false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. All centred on the idea that the “deep state” was lying to, and thus cheating, ordinary people. Mr Trump was their tribune.

It’s hard not to feel schadenfreude now that he’s at the sharp end of a theory that he at times encouraged and allies eagerly pushed: claims that the prison death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein might not be suicide after all, and that wealthy and well-connected associates were trying to hush up connections to the financier. Mr Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised that “truckloads” of documents would help reveal the truth and claimed that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now”.

Then, abruptly, the department of justice said that the financier’s death was not murder, that no more files on the investigation against him would be released, and that there was no list of “clients”. The administration says that Ms Bondi was referring to general files on the case. In short: many of those who promoted the idea that vast, vile secrets were being concealed now claim that there are no secrets at all – with no clear explanation for their volte-face.

The result has been uproar in the Maga movement, with far-right politicians and media figures including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer and Alex Jones among the unsatisfied. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House and a key ally, said that the justice department should “put it out there”.

Mr Trump attempted to dismiss the story as “boring”, before attacking his own supporters as “weaklings” for “(buying) into this ‘bullshit'”. Then, hours after a Wall Street Journal report that he sent a “bawdy” letter to Epstein – which he denies – he told Ms Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony on the sex-trafficking case.

Epstein’s crimes are fact, not a “hoax”, and it’s also fact that he had repeated contact with high-profile figures, including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Mr Trump himself – who once remarked of the financier: “Terrific guy … It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The files need not suggest, let alone confirm, any wrongdoing to embarrass anyone mentioned in them: highlighting the association is enough.

At the heart of all Maga conspiracies lies another kernel of truth: that the rich and powerful often get away with exploiting vulnerable people through connections to the state. Yet Trump voters fail to see how that relates to the administration’s broader actions.

They are unmoved by his reverse Robin Hood budget legislation, which snatches from the poor to give to billionaires – like those in his cabinet. It’s less visceral than Epstein’s crimes, and its brazenness may, counterintuitively, make it less viral. Many on the right blame imaginary weather modification, rather than the global heating caused by fossil fuel dependence, for Texas’s deadly floods. Conspiracy theories give those who feel powerless a sense of power; of knowing something that others can’t see. Even so, the truth revealed by the Epstein scandal – that ordinary Americans are deeply angry at the unfairness and abuses created by elites – is worth heeding, and demands a better political and economic response.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/18/the-guardian-view-on-maga-and-jeffrey-epstein-the-truth-about-donald-trump-and-conspiracy-theories