The news last week that Prince Andrew had been taken off all royal duties will hit hardest for those who can imagine what those duties might have been, or remember which royal Andrew was. (Okay, we know who Prince Andrew is, but that’s only because he’s a screwup. I offer a prize to the reader who can name his little brother, the Earl of Wessex.) But it’s mainly the cause of his demotion that’s important, because it can be traced back to deceased sexual predator—and what: financial whiz? blackmailer? Mossad operative? murder victim?—Jeffrey Epstein. It’s been one more beat in a long sequence of news reports that touch on Epstein yet fail to get at anything people care about most. The big mysteries—who the hell this guy was, how he got his money, what dirt he might have had and on whom, why government officials went easy on him, why no one can find his associate Ghislaine Maxwell—remain as unsolved as they were months ago.

All of this is perfect fodder for anyone with a paranoiac’s view of the world, but, increasingly, that’s all of us. Just this past month we could read that a Spanish security company managed to film and record Julian Assange in almost every room of Ecuador's embassy in London, allegedly passing on its files to the CIA via security officials employed by GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson at the Las Vegas Sands casino. We learned that Donald Trump and cronies were just the latest and crudest grifters in a cast of Republican and Democratic sleazeballs using Ukraine as everything from puppet to plunder buffet, all in a haze of disinformation as thick as Hunter Biden’s beard. We could read that two whistle-blowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were claiming that the organization distorted its assessment that Syria’s government had carried out a chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma. We could see horrifying illustrations by prisoner Abu Zubaydah of the brutality he experienced in CIA black sites.

It’s no wonder that half of Americans think Epstein didn’t kill himself, leaving only the other half, who think the same thing but won’t say it. The outliers are journalists, who not only believe the official story but insist the rest of us do so, too. Okay, I exaggerate, both about my fellow journalists and about the likelihood that Epstein’s death involved foul play. (Given that no one was caught on camera coming or going, it’s frankly unlikely that Epstein was murdered, even if it’s not impossible.) But one of the sadder developments of our time is that journalists seem on the whole to be getting less skeptical of authorities—with half of MSNBC looking as if it’s staffed by retired spooks and legacy newspapers citing political activists as if they’re disinterested analysts—even as most Americans are going in the opposite direction. Rather than convincing the public to ease up on this growing wave of distrust, the prestige press has instead joined countless other institutions in reputational erosion.

I’m enough inside the tent of American journalism to know that hungry reporters have been drawn to the Epstein case. (The fact that British outlets are saying more is due mainly to nonchalance about standards. Sure, it’s juicy that Bill Clinton is reported by the Daily Mail to have visited Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico multiple times, but the source is one guy who says he was told about it by another guy. Pulitzer won’t come a-knocking.) At the same time, you have to wonder: Why has there still been no exhaustive unmasking by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica, or for that matter this or another major magazine? Where’s the sense of urgency? When the right-wing outfit Project Veritas put out a leak of newscaster Amy Robach complaining that ABC had quashed her Epstein scoops for years, mentioning Alan Dershowitz and Bill Clinton and adding, “What we had was unreal,” outlets like the New York Times and CNN ignored it, and the few journalists who did bring it up concentrated most on whether ABC had been justified or craven. Fewer seemed to pursue the question that preoccupied much of Twitter and the comments sections: Well, what did Robach have? Can she tell us now?