Campus newspapers and what remains of journalism

Scott Lemieux juxtaposes the hard-hitting journalism being done by the Harvard Crimson on the Jeffrey Epstein case (although so far they seem to be focused on former university president Larry Summers and not Epstein’s other Ivy League buddies) with a Washington Post columnist who seems to be working extra hard to deter any reporting on this topic and who promotes an analogy of the Epstein story to “satanic panic, basement cults, ‘recovered memory’ hysteria, and the Comet Pizza shooting,” which seems to miss the point, in that the Epstein abuse stories, unlike satanic cults, “Pizzagate,” etc., are real and they really do involve members of the ruling class. I’m not saying that Summers, Dershowitz, etc., were conspiring with Epstein to do human trafficking; I’m saying that it seems very likely they were aware of what was going on (the timeline of this is discussed in various news articles) and they didn’t seem to care. So, yeah, this seems to be a very legitimate story about corruption and collusion among elites, unlike “satanic panic, basement cults,” etc., which are a story about false conspiracy theories being promoted by elites.

But my point here isn’t really about the story of Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, etc etc etc, but rather the role of the press.

A few years ago, I wrote about the decline of journalism and the rise of public relations and, unsurprisingly, it’s got a lot worse since then.

Thirty years ago, newspapers weren’t what they had been–lots of major cities were one-newspaper towns–but there must have been dozens of major independent news organizations in the country, starting with the three TV networks and the big-city dailies, but also including lots of local newspapers and TV stations, alternative newspapers such as the Village Voice which would break stories and cover topics the press would otherwise avoid, news magazines, and various other media outlets that would sometimes break news stories.

Now, there’s the New York Times and . . . not a lot else. The Times does a lot! Almost every day it seems they’re running an investigative piece that required a lot of reporting effort. But the rest of the journalism business seems hollowed out. There’s a lot more opinion writing than there used to be, but lot less regular news. You can get a lot of sports news, but I think that’s more a national aggregation than anything else. Compared to 30 or 50 years ago, you can get updates on sports all over the country; I don’t think there’s more total coverage, it’s just more remotely accessible. But when it comes to news, it just seems that there’s less.

That all impacts the Times and other remaining active news organizations: they’re aware of their role, which gives them an awkward responsibility–if they don’t cover a story, it might not get covered at all–and also they’re not so much pushed by the competition. It’s just a thinner market. You might expect the Washington Post to be all over the Epstein story (although without so much interest in Larry Summers), but instead the Post columnist is reacting to opinions about Summers on Twitter.

And this brings us to campus newspapers. As I discussed last week, the Harvard Crimson has a very good reason to go after Larry Summers: just a few weeks ago he publicly announced his intention to cut them off at the knees for what he called their “moral bankruptcy.” This is a former president of their university who remains well connected, indeed enough so that his disapproval could harm these student reporters seeking careers in business, government, or the news media. Summers’s threat was real! And, to their credit, the Crimson reporters handled it in the way that we would all hope that journalist would respond: by throwing the facts right back in Summers’s face. Student journalists can be fearless.

The scary thing is, student journalism may be one of the few remaining bastions of the independent press. The Columbia Spectator does a lot of reporting too.

Juxtaposing the Washington Post columnist telling people not to report on a major story, with the students at the Harvard Crimson just doing it . . . it’s a stunning contrast. The Crimson is aggressively running story after story, while the columnist doesn’t seem bothered at all that a morally compromised bigshot was trying to intimidate student journalists.

P.S. One positive sign is that sometimes professional news organizations will follow up on student reporting. For example, on 17 Feb 2026 the student newspaper at UC San Diego reported, “Emails released by the Department of Justice indicate that Jeffrey Epstein provided funding for a UC San Diego lab led by Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran, director of UCSD’s department of psychology’s Center for Brain and Cognition and emeritus distinguished professor. The DOJ released more than 3 million additional pages of the Epstein files on Jan. 30, in which Ramachandran is named by Deepak Chopra, a lifestyle guru with ties to UCSD. . . . On Sept. 25, 2017, Ramachandran replied to Chopra in an email regarding a study the lab was conducting on an ‘autistic savant who displays telepathy.’ Ramachandran wrote that he does not ‘have problem with [his] lab being funded by Epstein.’ . . . Ramanchandran further wrote that if Chopra’s ‘pal [Epstein] is serious about setting in motion a lab for the study of extraordinary brain potential . . . something like 500,000 to 3 million would get the administrators excited.'”

Then on 8 Mar 2026 the San Diego Union Tribune ran an article, “UCSD professors wanted money to research telepathy. They turned to Jeffrey Epstein,” with subtitle, “‘I don’t have a problem with my lab funded by Epstein,’ one wrote to another.” The article is paywalled so I can’t see if they credited the student newspaper for reporting on this first.