GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: The Atlantic goes tone-deaf on child sex trafficking.
Outlets like the Atlantic have carved out an entire cottage industry, dedicating millions in resources to covering the kook fringe right. That’s all well and good, but these same outlets and infotainment click-sites claim to be speaking truth to power. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that the Atlantic would run this thoroughly researched (read: spent time looking at 4Chan) piece suggesting that child trafficking is an elaborate hoax.
That’s especially true when you consider that the piece ran in the middle of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, and comes on the heels of an explosive report — in BuzzFeed of all places — that the CIA had evidence of employees and contractors committing sexual crimes against children, and took no action. It was also published in the same week that it emerged that a top Sony executive had been caught in a pedophile sting.
Herein lies the problem: how outlets like the Atlantic stir the pot and juice up the outrage themselves. It’s not like the QAnon conspiracies (or elaborate trolling) are worth taking seriously. But when you spend 1,500 words suggesting that child trafficking is a hoax on its face, and is only being pushed by that kook fringe, while the Ghislaine Maxwell trial proceeds with barely any mainstream media attention, curious minds will start to ask questions, even ludicrous ones.
That’s the box our elites have put themselves in. When national periodicals ignore someone like Maxwell and her alleged deeds in favor of internet weirdos on Facebook, it casts doubt on their intentions.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Evergreen:
Related: CNN Staffer Charged with Enticing Women and Their Underage Daughters to Engage in Sexual Activity.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): CIA Files Say Staff Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children. They Weren’t Prosecuted.
Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.
Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets. . . .
One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old. He was fired. A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers. He resigned. A third employee estimated that he had viewed up to 1,400 sexually abusive images of children while on agency assignments. The records do not say what action, if any, the CIA took against him. A contractor who arranged for sex with an undercover FBI agent posing as a child had his contract revoked.
Only one of the individuals cited in these documents was charged with a crime. In that case, as in the only previously known case of a CIA staffer being charged with child sexual crimes, the employee was also under investigation for mishandling classified material. . . .
The official, who noted the agency has had a problem with child abuse images stretching back decades, said they understand the need to protect “sensitive and classified equities.” However, “for crimes of a certain class whether it’s an intelligence agency or not, you just have to figure out how to prosecute these people.”
Sexual crimes involving children, including the viewing of images of abuse, have been uncovered at other agencies that handle sensitive information. In a November 2009 report, the Department of Defense acknowledged that dozens of Pentagon staff members or contractors had such images. In 2014, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community found that two officials from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees America’s spy satellites, acknowledged viewing images of child sexual abuse during polygraph examinations.
At a symposium in 2016, Daniel Payne, a top Pentagon security official, said that when workers’ computers were examined, “the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable.”
Just as it appears that everyone in our government has been corrupted by the Russians except Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look as if all of our institutions are hotbeds of child exploitation except for Comet Pizza.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Heh.
UPDATE (From Ed): Prosecution rests in Ghislaine Maxwell trial. “The Atlantic is owned by a company called Emerson Collective. The president and founder of Emerson is Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Since the publication of Tiffany’s piece, a photo alleged to show Maxwell and Laurene Powell Jobs in bathing suits laughing together on a couch has circulated online.”
(Updated and bumped.)
