Taylor Swift, E. Jean Carroll and the Stories the Establishment Tells and Sells
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to notice recurring cliques of prominent media personalities.
One night in 2019, around the time she wrote an article in New York Magazine accusing President Donald Trump of rape, the writer E. Jean Carroll attended a party at an apartment in Uptown Manhattan. Fellow guests included the Princeton professor emeritus and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, comedian Kathy Griffin, the Republican legal operative George Conway, the TV journalist Soledad O’Brien, and the sexual assault activist Amanda Nguyen. Their host was the writer and society fixture Molly Jong-Fast. A photo of the gathering entered circulation four months later, when President Trump was impeached and Kathy Griffin posted it under the headline Never Trump, the cause uniting the people at the party.
Four and a half years later, some of the same players aligned under the same banner gathered again—this time at The Flower Shop, a “hip” bar on the Lower East Side. Carroll, fresh from an $83 million defamation suit victory against Trump that flowed from her 2019 magazine article, celebrated with Molly Jong-Fast, New York Magazine’s ex-editor Kurt Andersen, the New York Times op-ed columnist Lydia Polgreen, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
These two gatherings of Carroll and her media friends bookend her odd late career arc, in which she’s become a certified “icon” off cases that turned on two-decade-old allegations which, on the metrics of hard, verifiable news stories, don’t seem to merit the repeated, repetitive, marquee media attention they’ve received in the New York Times, MSNBC, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and elsewhere. In this, they’re like many other recent storylines championed by establishment media in the age of Trump—from decades-old allegations against Brett Kavanaugh unsupported by key witnesses, to a yearslong investigation into Russia “collusion” exposed as faulty to its core, to “investigations” into Supreme Court corruption that have failed to uncover a single tangible link between the justices’ rulings and their lives.
Since 2017, these eccentric quests have been explained by critics as “Trump derangement syndrome”: the hyperbolic coverage that seems to infect major outlets and their upper-income Democrat readership over the former president and his appointees. But digging into the players and institutions who run the coverage suggests that it comes from something deeper, something built into how these institutions have operated for 30 years: an accelerating turn from reliable informing to the narrative sensationalizing of which Carroll and her friends are practitioners and symbols. Tracing how that turn happened, and how it created Carroll’s and the other “scandals” of our scandalized political age, means going back to when the trends began.
Read more in The American Conservative.
Photo by Eva Rinaldi.