“He is someone you can trust, and he will write what you want.” This line, from an email written in 2009 about New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas, was discovered among the Epstein files. The email was written by American financier Jeffrey Epstein and appears to offer Thomas’s services to Peter Mandelson, then the U.K. business secretary, saying that “if you need to use him, he is now living in London.”

The millions of documents and emails contained in the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice are an extremely valuable record of the internal structure of power and wealth at multiple levels. This article is GNV’s third piece on the Epstein files. The first examined the documents’ global implications, and the second explored Epstein’s connections with Japan.

This article focuses on the role of the news media in the Epstein affair. In particular, it examines the conduct of certain journalists at major media organizations who appeared to sympathize with and support Epstein and those around him. It also looks at some of the coverage that followed the release of the Epstein files. Taken together, these show that the media’s function as a watchdog over those with wealth and power has serious flaws.

New York Times headquarters (Photo: Dan DeLuca / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0])

Epstein and Michael Wolff

After being convicted in the United States in 2008 of procuring a minor for prostitution, Epstein launched an aggressive media strategy to rehabilitate his image and re-enter society. He hired publicists, had them draft articles portraying him as a philanthropist who made valuable contributions to scientific funding, and got those pieces placed in the news. His team managed to get favorable articles about him published in The Huffington Post, Forbes, and National Review. Epstein and his public relations staff appear to have checked the impact of those articles by monitoring where his name appeared in internet search engine results.

Prominent journalists at major media outlets also actively supported Epstein. One was Michael Wolff, known mainly for his articles in Vanity Fair, who spent a great deal of time with Epstein, and the two were quite close. Wolff had known Epstein since the 1990s, and when he was pressed about ethical questions surrounding his dealings with Epstein, he acknowledged that, to maintain the trust of his source, he “often told him what he wanted to know.” Wolff’s main interest seems to have been obtaining critical information about Donald Trump, who would later become U.S. president, and Epstein had a wealth of information that Wolff wanted on that front.

Many argue that Wolff violated journalistic ethics in his dealings with Epstein. For example, Wolff disclosed to Epstein the contents of a book he was writing, telling him he was considering portraying Epstein as “reliable” and “smart.” It is unclear whether that description actually made it into the published book.

Emails between Wolff and Epstein (DOJ: EFTA02616235)

In addition, numerous emails reveal that Wolff and Epstein were working together to devise strategies to counter media criticism of Epstein and restore his image. Other supporters joined them at times, including former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Wolff also told Epstein that he had introduced him to a crisis-management PR firm and had discussed Epstein’s situation with the friend who ran the company.

Moreover, a series of emails in 2015 and 2016 from Wolff to Epstein show Wolff advising Epstein on how to use information he possessed to damage Trump, then running for president. In one email just before the 2016 election, Wolff wrote: “This is the week to go public and talk about Trump. You can gain significant public sympathy and help to take him down. Interested?”

Epstein and The New York Times

The Epstein files also reveal numerous connections between Epstein and people at The New York Times. As noted at the beginning of this article, Landon Thomas, whom Epstein saw as a “journalist he could handle,” played a somewhat similar role to Wolff. Thomas had a long-standing friendship with Epstein going back at least to 2002, when he wrote a flattering profile in New York Magazine, calling Epstein an “international money man of mystery.” The piece opened by referring to Epstein’s “keen eye for the ladies” and his “relentless brain, one that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists.”

Thomas’s emails show him constantly fawning over Epstein in order to obtain useful information and access to sources for his own work. In one 2016 email, he asked whether an article he had written—which did not mention Epstein by name but appeared beneficial to him—might, through Epstein, lead to an opportunity to meet Bill Gates. At the same time, Thomas also provided Epstein with information and contacts. For example, in 2017, he tried to arrange a meeting between Epstein and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. It is unclear whether that meeting took place.

Emails between Mandelson and Epstein (DOJ: EFTA01816634)

The relationship between Thomas and Epstein went far beyond that of a reporter and source. Thomas frequently referred to himself as Epstein’s “friend.” He also asked Epstein to donate to a school he supported and sought career advice from him.

Several of Thomas’s emails contained words of sympathy and advice regarding critical media coverage of Epstein. In a 2011 email, Thomas expressed interest in writing an article rebutting the allegations against Epstein. By 2018, however, he told Epstein he would not write any piece under his own byline about him because of their friendship, although he offered to help structure Epstein-related articles on which his colleagues were working. In the same email, he described himself as Epstein’s “unofficial PR adviser.”

Among New York Times writers there was another figure who, while not as close as Thomas, still had ties to Epstein: prominent columnist David Brooks. In November 2025, Brooks wrote an op-ed titled “The Epstein Affair? I’m Not Going There,” dismissing the Epstein case as something that did little more than fuel conspiracy theories. Just one month later, the partial release of Epstein-related documents included a photo of Brooks at a 2011 “billionaires’ dinner” in New York hosted by the group Edge, which Epstein also attended.

After this revelation, Brooks repeatedly insisted he had never met Epstein. He said about 60 people attended the dinner, making it unlikely he had met or spoken with him, and claimed he did not know who else would be there in advance or that he had never even heard Epstein’s name until 2018. The New York Times stated that Brooks “had no contact with Epstein either before or after this one event.” These claims are likely false. An attendee list with directions to the dinner venue appears to have been sent out beforehand, and this list of 28 names clearly shows Jeffrey Epstein’s name immediately below Brooks’s. Furthermore, in 2014 Brooks attended a much smaller “billionaires’ dinner” in Vancouver at which Epstein also was present.

New York Times columnist David Brooks at the “billionaires’ dinner” (Photo: House Oversight 084233)

Finally, another figure linked to both the New York Times and Epstein was Joichi Ito. At the time, Ito served simultaneously as director of the MIT Media Lab and as a member of the New York Times Company’s board of directors. In 2019 he resigned from both posts over his ties to Epstein. Those ties were mainly related to his MIT position and are seen as unrelated to the Times itself. GNV examined this relationship in an earlier article.

A lack of coverage

While American media did not completely ignore the Epstein case over the years, the fact remains that many journalists were in an extremely close position to Epstein without appearing particularly eager to get to the truth. To borrow the words of one political analyst, “legacy news media have long held the very sources and evidence needed to expose the core of the Epstein story.”

Coverage of Epstein surged in 2025 after the U.S. government released a vast trove of related documents. But the focus of that coverage has largely been on the actions and criminality of individuals connected to Epstein, and on the partisan and intra-party political maneuvering around what the documents revealed. Very little reporting has delved into the broader significance of the case—namely, the methods that the documents show “shadow elites” using to try to sway key political, economic, and even foreign-policy decisions.

The media have also largely failed to reflect on their own responsibility in all this. When the first Epstein files were released, the New York Times ran a piece in November 2025 titled “Epstein’s Emails Reveal a Lost New York,” using language that led readers to believe this sort of world was now gone. The article opened with the claim: “The recently released documents of the disgraced financier are steeped in the atmosphere of an exclusive world that has now largely disappeared.” It went on to argue that the emails “show how this cloistered sphere was swallowed by the rising power of the internet and disappeared into the mists of time.” Only after reading 1,100 words do readers learn that “Mr. Epstein also had contact with Landon Thomas Jr., a New York Times reporter from 2002 to 2019.” A February 2026 piece titled “The Epstein Files and the Hidden World of Unaccountable Elites” shows a somewhat deeper understanding of the documents and their significance, but Thomas is not mentioned, even in passing, until after the 1,380-word mark.

The New York Times website (Photo: PixieMe / Shutterstock.com)

British media show similar tendencies. As researchers at the London School of Economics point out, “Coverage has remained fragmented and person-focused. Each file dump has prompted a flurry of coverage of whose names have been invoked, what has been said, which celebrities have been pressured.” Such reporting “has limited the space for a deeper inquiry into how elite networks are formed, how legal impunity works, or how media platforms act as intermediaries in creating institutional access. Media organisations did not conceal the facts, they reframed them … The public could see the trees, but not the forest.”

Though Japanese media coverage has been far more limited than that in the U.S. or U.K., what has appeared has followed a very similar pattern. The headlines in Japan’s major newspapers are dominated by the names of American and British figures such as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and former British prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The media also seemed to avoid reporting on Joichi Ito’s case until the New York Times ran an article focusing on it, after which they finally began covering him. Yet these newspapers still have not moved into commentary or deeper discussion of the institutional issues and other broader implications raised by the Epstein files.

Members of the elite club?

Wolff, Thomas, Brooks, and Ito all moved in the social circles of people with immense wealth and power, spent long periods in close contact with the very rich, and were dependent on them in a variety of ways. It is not hard to imagine how people like this might be drawn into the world of “shadow elites” and come to sympathize or align themselves with them.

For example, in 2003 Wolff and Epstein attempted, along with other wealthy individuals, to buy New York Magazine. The bid failed, but at the time Wolff argued in an interview with the New York Times that owning the magazine would bring “unimaginable access to the social set that the magazine ought to occupy.”

Michael Wolff (right) talking at a party (Photo: Financial Times / Flickr [CC BY 2.0])

New York Times columnist Brooks also appears ideologically aligned with such forces. According to an article by U.S. media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Brooks has, throughout his career, “served as an apologist for the ruling class, consistently downplaying and excusing its crimes and misjudgments.” For instance, he wrote a column in the paper advocating the rollback of democracy at the national level, in which specific reforms would be devised by a small group of elites and then pushed through in a process he openly called “shamelessly elitist.” This way of thinking aligns with Epstein’s ideas about governance.

This kind of intimacy with the wealthy and powerful is not limited to a handful of individual reporters or board members. It is an institutional problem. The New York Times Company, for instance, has a market capitalization of several billion U.S. dollars, and its controlling Sulzberger family is considered extremely wealthy. The Times is frequently accused of a pro-wealthy bias in its coverage. A study of the newsroom’s backgrounds also found an “extreme” overrepresentation of graduates from the very top U.S. universities.

This structural tendency for media to align with political and economic elites has been illuminated by the so-called propaganda model. Ironically, one of the theorists who proposed this model, Noam Chomsky, has himself been revealed to have had a close relationship with Epstein.

Not Israel, but Russia

Media coverage of Epstein’s activities, the networks he built, and the framing of the affair as a whole also need to be examined from the perspective of politics. In part this concerns domestic political alignment. Wolff’s efforts to use Epstein’s knowledge to prevent Trump from being elected president are a typical example.

But the issue is even broader. The propaganda model shows that the media act as “fellow members” of the foreign-policy establishment, with a tendency to fall in line with what is seen as bipartisan government consensus on relations with other countries. How foreign-policy issues in the Epstein affair have been covered further confirms this tendency. The Epstein files suggest that “shadow elites” exist in multiple countries and attempt to support and guide official political elites in particular directions on foreign-policy matters. This is evident in the media’s skewed reporting on suspicions about Epstein’s ties to Israel and Russia.

Barak and Epstein (center) (Photo: House Oversight 071621)

The Epstein files contain a wealth of information on his connections to Israel. Some of these ties were covered in a previous GNV article. What the files make particularly clear is Epstein’s close relationship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, with whom he cooperated on business matters and informal diplomatic activities. After that article was published, Drop Site News reported that the Israeli government had installed surveillance equipment in a New York apartment owned by Epstein where Barak stayed for long periods, and had also vetted the staff working there. Drop Site News had earlier reported that Israeli military intelligence officers had stayed for weeks at a time in Epstein’s apartment between 2013 and 2019.

The documents also show that Epstein sought to build ties with powerful figures in Russia, apparently with the aim of influencing Russian policy in the Middle East. A prime example is his role in arranging a meeting between Barak and Vladimir Putin. Epstein also tried, unsuccessfully, to set up a meeting between himself and Putin, and he appears to have been unable to obtain a visa to visit Russia. Unlike with Israel, no credible evidence has been found in the Epstein files that he was acting on behalf of Russia or its interests.

Major media coverage of the Epstein files has not reflected these realities. The U.S. foreign-policy establishment and U.S. media alike have avoided closely examining Epstein’s obvious and extensive ties with Israel, focusing instead on his links with Russia—even though, in both quantity and substance, the latter pale in comparison.

The New York Times, for example, ran a story in February 2026 titled “The Epstein Files Reveal Attempts to Build Ties With Russian Officials,” detailing the ties with Russia that the paper could confirm. Yet it has still not published any article focused on Epstein’s much deeper connections with Israel. The Times judged that it needed to run a piece on Epstein’s relationship with model Naomi Campbell, highlighting that her name appears nearly 300 times in the files. Meanwhile, although Ehud Barak’s name appears more than 4,000 times, he is mentioned only in passing on a list of people associated with Epstein. This coverage shows how the media distort interpretations of real events to fit the narrative of U.S. foreign policy.

Japan’s major newspapers have not mentioned Epstein’s ties with Israel at all. Nor have they discussed his connections with Russia, though some television news programs have covered that angle.

Epstein (left) posing in front of a helicopter (Photo: EFTA00003260)

Conclusion

The U.S. Department of Justice was legally obliged to release millions of emails and other documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, but in violation of that law it redacted many files and blocked the release of many more. The way the released files have been posted has also made it extremely time-consuming and laborious to understand their contents.

Even so, software engineers have independently created tools such as Jmail (Jmail) to make searching and examining the material much easier, at least to some extent. The enormous volume of information now available offers a precious opportunity to understand how power and wealth interact.

The question is how media outlets—so closely intertwined with political and economic elites—will choose to make use of that opportunity.

Writer: Virgil Hawkins

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