Perhaps you didn’t have time to catch The Atlantic’s “MAGA Influencers Don’t Understand What Journalism Is.” After all, there’s been plenty of digital ink spilled over the Jeffrey Epstein case, which it’s about, that pretty much every outlet has covered it.
You can almost come up with fake headlines that are probably closer to real pieces than you’d like if you tried hard enough. For instance, let me take a guess at what Vice published: “I Sniffed Industrial-Strength Cambodian Glue While on a Ayahuasca Trip and It Gave Me Insight Into Why Dan Bongino is Upset at Pam Bondi.” The Guardian: “Jeffrey Epstein Is on MAGA’s Radar Again. Why Are All Conservative Men Responsible for His Depredations?” BuzzFeed: “46 Disappointed Puppers Who Think It’s Way Past Time the DOJ Published the Full Epstein Files. [With pictures and captions. 11 doggos have party hats on, too].”
To be fair, Helen Lewis acknowledged in the first sentence of the piece that “defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis.” There’s a reason for this, mind you — where, pray tell, were these “mainstream journalists” like herself during the Biden administration, when some actual truth-to-powering might have gotten results before intelligence could theoretically destroy anything too unseemly in the Epstein files? — but there’s one thing worse than both mainstream journalism and VD public relations: conservative opinion writers and social media personalities, or “MAGA influencers” as they’re repeatedly called throughout the piece.
Lewis began her Friday piece with the “Phase 1” rollout of the Epstein files, coverage of which she described thusly:
The 15 handpicked newshounds included Jack Posobiec, promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok social-media account itemizes every single American schoolteacher with blue hair and wacky pronouns; and the comedian Chad Prather, performer of the parody song “Beat That A**,” about the secret to good parenting. Also present was DC_Draino, whose name is a promise to unclog the sewers of the nation’s capital.
The chosen ones duly emerged bearing ring binders and smug expressions — only to discover that most of the information that the government had fed them had already been made public. Several of the influencers have since complained that the Trump administration had given them recycled information. They couldn’t seem to understand why White House officials treated them like idiots. I can help with this one. That’s because they think you are idiots.
The harsh but simple truth is that powerful people, including President Donald Trump, do not freely hand out information that will make them look bad. If a politician, PR flak, or government official is telling you something, assume that they’re lying to you or spinning or — at best — coincidentally telling you the truth because it will damage their enemies. “We were told that more was coming,” Posobiec complained, but professional commentators should be embarrassed about waiting for the authorities to bless them with scoops. That’s not how things work. You have to go and find things out.
Aside from handpicking one quote from Posobiec to describe how he’s covered this, Lewis is not entirely inaccurate here: There need to be investigative journalists who do not just take information freely handed out to them, nor should opinion writers get this and pretend that’s all she wrote. In fact, that’s why we’re here — because these opinion journalists held the Trump administration to account, eventually. And yes, the “Phase 1” event will not go down in history in “Great Moments in White House Pseudoevents.”
Where she’s inaccurate is why Raichik, DC_Draino, et. al., are also necessary: because those investigative journalists need to be held accountable themselves. These are not people pretending to be the conservative Ed Murrow. Rather, they’re conservatives who are there to remind people who think they are the second coming of Ed Murrow that they’re doing the exact same thing Lewis is complaining about them doing, except under the pretense that they aren’t.
Is there anything the establishment media could do that would regain your trust?
For instance, for those of you who haven’t been keeping track of The Atlantic over the years, it’s done a bit more than just drop “Monthly” from its title. The magazine that was, at one time, part of the secular trinity of cosmopolitan journalism has somehow debased itself beyond the other two legs of that stool, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
Things were already bad when, in 2017, multibillionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs purchased it through her philanthropic arm, the Emerson Collective, where it essentially operates as a kind of journalistic charity case. Jobs doesn’t have any background in journalism, or any background in anything aside from being married to one of the more untimely celebrity decedents of this century. If you need a few more hints, he was closely associated with fruit and silicon.
That’s right: Powell Jobs was basically to the iPhone what Kevin Federline was to “Oops, I Did It Again.”
That being said, attacking someone for being married to an infinitely more talented former spouse — especially a dead one — would be bad form if The Atlantic didn’t become an attack-dog rag desperately in need of someone holding the purse-strings who was the first pinscher to bite. It would also be bad form if being unmoored from the worries of finances increased The Atlantic’s independence (it didn’t; the magazine became a strident exercise in confirmation bias hidden behind quite stubborn paywalls despite a general decline in quality) or if there wasn’t something to hold The Atlantic to account for.
You know, like Powell Jobs hanging out with Epstein’s convicted pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell:
WARNING: The following post contains an image that may offend some readers.
The woman on the right is Ghislaine Maxwell. She trafficked children for Jeffrey Epstein. The woman on the left owns your magazine. https://t.co/rNWc7gcnj4 pic.twitter.com/dl7V7E6km7
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 20, 2025
If this were a bad Conan O’Brien Photoshop job, it’d still make a messy point about the kind of air-quotes “journalism” now engaged in by what was once one of the nation’s foremost journalistic institutions. The photo, the article, and the lack of acknowledgement of the photo in the article, are all real. I … think that’s an accomplishment? You’re going to have to give me a day or so to process this.
Helen Lewis could, of course, take her talents elsewhere to complain about “MAGA influencers” complaining that the media hasn’t exactly done its job on Epstein or checked itself for its multifarious connections to the man, while still bloviating about a dubious letter between the president and the disgraced financier before the financier was disgraced which doesn’t sound like the president wrote it. Instead, she wrote a piece about perfidious MAGA without mentioning that the woman who keeps her out of Temu clothes, Steve Jobs’ widow, chilled out poolside (and one would guess otherwise) with one of two convicted sex traffickers in the most peculiar, sordid, and important potential honeytrap operations in modern history. But no, let’s talk about the guy who wrote a funny song about spanking your kids as punishment. That’s what’s important.
And it’s not like this is a black swan in the modus operandi of the publication. Remember how The Atlantic juiced its visibility for a year or so by becoming COVID Panic Monthly? The Foundation for Economic Education even awarded it the worst headline of the pandemic, which is saying something: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” an April 29, 2020 piece about re-opening schools long after it had become clear they weren’t a vector of transmission. (For something that desperate, apparently the Apple Vision Pro has lost a lot more money than we even already thought.)
Or maybe it’s just that, with all the money in the world to maintain a prized journalistic institution, Powell Jobs has turned the whole thing into a hive of “anti-MAGA influencers,” not “mainstream journalism.” Remember, this is the magazine that published — without so much as vetting — a years-old one-source quote about Donald Trump wanting generals like Hitler had in World War II just weeks before the election, and from a source whose claims about Trump had been shot down, credibility-wise, by even the GOP candidate’s worst enemies,
Ah well. Maybe Helen Lewis can move onto that “46 Disappointed Puppers Who Think It’s Way Past Time Ghislaine Maxwell Got a Weekend Pass to Hang Out Poolside With My Boss” listicle now. No. 27 is wearing a “Epstein Is Like a Shirt: He Didn’t Hang Himself” propeller beanie! So cute!
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