As we track who is next in the Epstein files, a wilful uncertainty marks our forced ignoring of the genocides, the wars, the shootings, the media
Published Date – 24 February 2026, 09:48 PM
By Pramod K Nayar
One of the expected outcomes of the slow but steady drip of Epstein news is that the rest of the news has been pushed off our radar. Indeed, the sheer information overload about the people (perps, victims, bystanders), redactions, network, money in the Epstein Files, has ensured that the global interest in his sleazy operation has remained piqued.
Reporting Sleaze
Sleaze — which originally meant corruption among politicians — sells, as yellow journalism, celebrity reportage and media coverage in general have long understood. Whether this is in the paparazzi’s pursuit of celebs in their getaways or speculations on marriages, affairs, divorces and so on, ‘nothing succeeds like excess’(as Oscar Wilde put it) when it comes to sex.
While this is not to erase the horrors the Epstein operations perpetrated upon hundreds of women and underage girls, the focal point of the coverage has remained the perps. Outing those who were a part of the sleaze network has of course been central to this focus, although it remains to be seen, except in the case of Prince Andrew, whether any of them will ever be convicted.
As media commentators from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman have noted, the form determines the content. In the case of the public ‘exposé’, we believe we are being given access to something hitherto hidden. And a case of reportage when titled ‘revealed’ has the same effect. Here, the form of the coverage being titled ‘the Epstein files’, with the connotations of the official dossier or report, leads us to treat the information, although heavily redacted, as akin to official accounts. This automatically leads us to invest our trust in the files.
Are the files then an instance of disinformation rather than misinformation? Disinformation is the deliberate placing of superficial, partial or false information with the purpose of misleading the audience. The titling of the documents as ‘files’ points to a media ritual.
The media theorist Nick Couldry describes media ritual as
any actions organised around key media-related categories and boundaries, whose performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the underlying ‘value’ expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre. Through media rituals, we act out, indeed naturalise, the myth of the media’s social centrality.
The current emphasis on the release of the files implies that it is the media that is the key factor in ‘revealing’ the sordid saga, in pointing to the lack of rectitude, honour, responsibilities within the higher echelons of the social order. But this itself is a construction of the centrality of media, when it is the state’s investigating agencies that are willfully leading the audience away from Gaza, the Rohingyas, planetary crises, the denial of rights and imminent colonisation of Greenland.
Ignoring or Ignorance
We need to see the Epstein files, heavily redacted, never fully opened up, as leading us away from knowledge to something else, a process of constructing ignorance called agnotology.
The construction of ignorance or partial knowledge is probably then a media-and-state orchestrated process calculated to ensure we recognise the Epstein face and some of the perps from the files.
The form of the coverage, with its connotations of an official dossier, leads us to treat the information, although heavily redacted, as akin to an official account, and to invest our trust in the files
What are we being led to ignore with the excesses of the Epstein files? Gaza and the genocide there are off the front pages and our attention spectrum. Global distresses of multiple kinds are off too. The collapse of the world order, such as it was, is secondary to Epstein. So much so that the alarming facts behind AI — for example, the quantum of resources, including rare earth elements and water for cooling, the building of data centres, the random shooting of civilians by ‘law enforcement’ officials, the erosion of academic freedoms, the buying out of the media — are not so important anymore.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has noted the slide between ‘ignoring’ and ‘ignorance’. We disown knowledge, he argues, where ‘disowned knowledge is not ignorance, not an absence, but the presence of something, say of the undone, of one’s hand in one’s undoing’.
[T]he failure of knowledge is a failure of acknowledgment, which means, whatever else it means, that the result of the failure is not an ignorance but an ignoring, not an opposable doubt but an unappeasable denial, a willful uncertainty that constitutes an annihilation.
A wilful uncertainty marks our forced ignoring of the genocides, the wars, the shootings, the bought media because we are busy being informed of who is next in the Epstein files.
We are ignoring things around us. It is an undoing, consciously, of what one did have in hand — knowledge, information — so that one could disown all knowledge, except those of Epstein.
Informing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman in his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) argued that television gives us the illusion of being informed when actually it leads us away from knowledge towards ignorance. He spoke of the information-action ratio, where we can calculate the value of a certain piece of information and the possible action that may be undertaken based on the information.
We now have a high information-action ratio in the age of decontextualised information. As Postman puts it, this excess ‘made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote’.
Postman compared the information being delivered via television to the drug ‘soma’ from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World to describe how the audience has drugged itself into a state of wilful ignorance and bliss as a way of escaping the tyranny of their time. They give up their rights in favour of TV-driven amusement.
The lifestyles of the rich, the famous and the powerful — are there middle-class people in the files, except those trafficked? — as celebrity studies show us, hold perpetual fascination for the audiences. We do not have to do anything with the information about these lifestyles, which are portrayed as distant and distinct from our own. This information, in Postman’s words, carries ‘diminished social and political potency’.
The Epstein files come close to this formulation. The events recorded, the people documented are given to us in distanced, even exotic (private islands, private security, personal jets) forms. They become, oddly but like celebrities in general, aspirational models even (though secretly!). The decontextualised and excess information renders the perps in the files remote in more ways than one: they now return to our mind’s eye only in terms of their existence within the files being revealed bit by bit.
We have been Epsteined. We are informing ourselves to death.
(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)