"The media should be digging into the Epstein story to root out threats to our children. It’s alarming that the ghost of Epstein can inspire competitive news organizations to collude to suppress such an important story."

In American Greatness, Adam Mill writes,

...This isn’t about like-minded or politically corrupt “journalists” abandoning their independence for the sake of getting Trump. The Epstein story has real victims, often children, who were exploited as sex slaves for the benefit of rich and powerful people. While Epstein may no longer pose a threat to those children, left unidentified are predators who paid for access to the victims.

The market, including the black market, abhors a vacuum and new Epsteins undoubtedly have risen to meet the demand. It appears ABC and CBS collaborated to punish somebody they believed exposed ABC’s suppression of a story that might have identified some of these predators still among us. That’s strong evidence of an agreement to restrain the “trade” that both companies ply—the news.

This moves the needle of media corruption way beyond political bias. Our news media has a role in disseminating information for the sake of public safety and a free market normally would reward an organization that scooped its competitors. Because of the apparent ABC/CBS conspiracy, however, the public may be less aware of the threat posed by these predators. Authorities have a duty to investigate whether ABC/CBS conspired to keep from the public information that parents and authorities could have used to protect children from these predators.

...Under Department of Justice policies, however, media are “required to retain separate editorial and reporting staffs and to determine their editorial policies independently.” Is that happening? It doesn’t seem so when a phone call from ABC can result in a termination of a CBS employee for suspicion of committing the unforgivable act of reporting news!

If true, CBS should have responded to ABC’s request to fire the “whistleblower” with raucous laughter and the abrupt sound of the phone disconnecting. CBS should be running commercials championing the scoop of its competitor ABC’s corruption. It’s not. And that should concern Americans.

Thus an agreement between two news organizations to kill a story, arguably, is a restraint in trade.

...The First Amendment means nothing without a free and competitive media through which the various outlets act as checks upon each other. The media should be digging into the Epstein story to root out threats to our children. It’s alarming that the ghost of Epstein can inspire competitive news organizations to collude to suppress such an important story.

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