Fifth Avenue Forum

She had some connection to Epstein and talked to him at the time, and he told this woman that these girls were extorting him with sex.

They are not alone. Contemporary culture trusts feelings over facts, rewards heated emotion — tears or anger — and rejects medium cool. The effect on journalism is unmistakable. And a lot of the blame can be placed on those all-too-common twin devils: television and the internet.

From the earliest days of television, journalists understood the power of an image to overwhelm objectivity. That’s why Cronkite and others worked hard to present the news without emotional cues: no raised eyebrows, head-shaking, or wide-eyed incredulity. They presented the news simply, expecting this would counteract that gut-level response all humans have to striking images.

It didn’t work for long. As television began to overtake newspapers, images trumped words, viewing overpowered reading. In the 1980s TV news actually became profitable, which increased pressure on electronic journalism to highlight emotional images that delivered viewers.

But emotions can be like an addiction. The only way to hold a viewer’s attention is to continually ratchet up the emotional stakes. It’s not enough to connect passionately to a picture or a video clip; the audience also expects a fierce attachment to news anchors and reporters — they want to see journalists emote, which is embraced as a more reliable truth than the facts and figures being reported.

Media analysts refer to this as the “post-literate” society, where words matter less and images are our main “language,” the most effective way for humans to communicate.

In a way, we’ve been here before: Call it “pre-literate” America, at the beginnings of mass communication more than century ago. Back then, vast sections of the populace, from rural areas to immigrant-swelled cities, had at best a basic grasp of reading. In that culture, “yellow journalism” thrived. Newspapers relied on simple sentences, bold headlines and lots of big photos. The Hearst and Pulitzer chains competed for emotion-driven stories like crime sprees and sex scandals. Their papers were often aligned with a political party (Pulitzer the Democrats, Hearst the Republicans) and each accused the other of exaggeration and sensationalism — in other words, “fake news.”

Reading the migrant camp inspector's reports, well done America.