On the unoriginality economy of Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson—and what Julie K. Brown’s Epstein reporting shows by contrast
It was not Alex Jones or Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson who brought down Jeffrey Epstein, but instead an unassuming female investigative reporter called Julie K. Brown. She had to convince her boss to fund the story initially by framing it as riding the “me too” wave which was popular at the time. By the time the article appeared in the Miami Herald she was almost too broke to buy the celebratory bagels for herself and a few of her colleagues.
The typical workday of Alex Jones was a stark contrast: He could waltz into his office and glance over some mainstream news stories printed out by his staff. Once his broadcast started it was the familiar autopilot mode of ranting and raving and talking to guests over the phone.
Jones had had the money to hire Brown before the big Epstein investigation and other real journalists like her. We shouldn’t necessarily expect an aging business owner to do gumshoe reporting himself but we should definitely expect him to hire capable people. Imagine if Brown had landed the scoop as an employee of the Infowars brand.
Big and often wealthy internet influencers face some of the same dilemmas as Brown’s bosses as the Herald: Why fund an expensive fishing expedition which may not yield anything or end in a story that is quickly forgotten?
1) “Unoriginal” is not an insult. It’s a production model.
Calling a media figure “unoriginal” can sound like a vague aesthetic complaint—like you’re accusing them of being boring, derivative, or lazy. But for the influencer-commentator class, unoriginality is often the point. It’s the rational output of incentives.
A useful distinction:
- Original reporting creates new, checkable information: documents unearthed, sources cultivated, victims heard, public records assembled into a coherent factual claim, wrongdoing that was previously hidden made public in a way that survives scrutiny.
- Original commentary (rarer than it sounds) can create new analysis: a real synthesis, a new conceptual model, a careful argument anchored in evidence.
- Recycling content creates neither. It repackages material produced elsewhere (mainstream reporting, court filings, viral web detritus, partisan messaging, foreign propaganda narratives) into emotionally charged “takes” optimized for attention and monetization.
That third category is not a failure of talent. It is a business model. It is the media equivalent of fast fashion: most of the work is not designing; it is churning.
And churn loves four feedstocks:
- Mainstream reporting (the raw facts)
- Viral nonsense (algorithmically boosted rumor, satire misread as news, doctored clips)
- Fabricated sensation (claims designed to be repeated, not verified)
- Power-messaging (talking points from political factions, sometimes echoed by foreign influence operations)
Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson sit heavily in this churn category, and audiences pay them but receive little value. That argument becomes sharper when you compare them to a journalist who did the opposite: Julie K. Brown, whose Epstein investigation required time, discomfort, documentation, and the kind of persistence that doesn’t scale well on the attention platforms.
Brown’s work for the Miami Herald—often summarized as “Perversion of Justice”—tracked down dozens of women and reopened public attention on how Epstein obtained a lenient deal and continued to evade accountability. The Herald describes it as a year-long investigation in which Brown “tracked down more than 60 women.” Miami Herald+1 The National Press Club credits the series with helping lead to a federal sex trafficking indictment and to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta because of his earlier role in the deal. press.org+1
If you want a practical definition of “value” in media, it’s hard to beat that.
So this essay is not “commentators bad, journalists good.” It’s a deeper comparison of two production systems:
- The recycling machine: cheap inputs, high output, high emotion, low verification, heavy monetization.
- The shoeleather reporter: expensive inputs (time, legal risk, trauma exposure, record work), slower output, lower “content volume,” higher factual yield.
2) The influencer pipeline: how unoriginality is manufactured at scale
To understand why the influencer-commentator class so often feels interchangeable, you have to look at the assembly line.
2.1 The algorithm rewards speed, certainty, and conflict—not accuracy
When your distribution depends on feeds, recommendation engines, and virality, you are rewarded for:
- posting quickly,
- speaking confidently,
- framing conflict as existential,
- and turning every event into a moral melodrama.
That reward structure is why public concern increasingly flags “online influencers/personalities” as major misinformation risks in survey research collected by the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report work. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk+1
The “unoriginality” I am describing isn’t always a lack of imagination. It’s a rational adaptation to a system that punishes carefulness.
2.2 Commentary has a built-in parasitism: it needs another organism’s facts
A commentator can be brilliant, but even brilliant commentary needs raw material. If you don’t produce new evidence, you must:
- rely on journalists who do,
- rely on institutions that disclose,
- or rely on the internet’s rumor ecology.
That dependency creates a weird hostility: commentators often denounce “the media,” yet their daily content pipeline is built on mainstream reporting—only repackaged with a different tone. When they claim to be “telling you what they won’t,” they frequently mean: “I’m repeating what they reported, but with an amateurish conspiratorial frame.”
2.3 The plausible deniability trick: “I’m just asking questions”
The most efficient way to spread questionable claims without owning them is the rhetorical posture of innocence:
- “Isn’t it interesting that…”
- “People are saying…”
- “I’m not claiming it’s true, I’m just asking…”
- “Why aren’t they talking about this…”
- “We can’t trust anything, so any claim is equally plausible…”
This posture is perfect for recycling, because it allows the influencer to:
- inject a rumor into the audience’s mind,
- enjoy the engagement boost,
- and later retreat to “it was just a discussion.”
This is one reason “unoriginality” pairs so easily with fabricated sensation. You don’t have to prove anything; you only have to place a suspicion.
3) Alex Jones: unoriginality as weaponized sensationalism
Alex Jones is the clearest example because the factual record includes major legal judgments about his promotion of false claims.
A Connecticut jury awarded $965 million in compensatory damages against Jones for his false Sandy Hook claims, and the overall judgment has been discussed in the billion-dollar range across reporting; in 2025 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his challenge to the defamation judgment, leaving it intact. Reuters+1
You don’t need to argue about “style” here. The court outcomes exist because the conduct was not merely “edgy commentary.” It was the repeated promotion of a lie that harmed real people.
3.1 Why Jones is “unoriginal” even when he seems inventive
Jones appears original because he generates a constant stream of dramatic narratives. But the deeper mechanism is not creative discovery; it’s conspiracy remix:
- Take a real event (a shooting, a pandemic, an election, a war),
- splice it into a preexisting template (“false flag,” “deep state,” “crisis actors,” “globalists”),
- add invented connective tissue (“secret plan,” “hidden hand”),
- then monetize the fear and rage.
The originality is not in evidence. It’s in plotting—in manufacturing a story that feels explanatory. The audience experiences the sensation of understanding, even though no new verified information was produced.
3.2 The “bad apple” shield doesn’t work when the brand is the method
Jones is the brand. That’s why the Sandy Hook record matters: it shows the difference between a commentator who occasionally makes errors and a business model that profits from narrative pollution.
And notice the moral economics:
- The influencer sells the feeling of forbidden knowledge.
- The victims bear the cost of the lie.
- The legal system becomes the only forced “fact-checker” with teeth.
3.3 What the paying follower gets
Jones’ audiences have historically been monetized through a media-and-commerce blend: attention → trust → purchases. Even without detailing every product ecosystem, the general structure is visible in how courts and coverage discuss whether the operation profited from the false claims and the harassment cycle that followed. Reuters
What does the follower get in return?
Not original reporting.
Not reliable analysis.
Often not even accurate summaries of mainstream reporting.
They get membership in a worldview—one that can be emotionally satisfying precisely because it is unfalsifiable and totalizing.
4) Candace Owens: the influencer as viral amplifier and controversy entrepreneur
Candace Owens is different in tone and target demographics, but the production logic can still converge on recycling plus sensation.
Two public anchors illustrate the problem your prompt points to:
- Fact-check ecosystems have repeatedly addressed claims associated with her. FactCheck.org, for example, has a “person” archive collecting fact checks related to Owens. FactCheck.org
- In 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron filed a defamation lawsuit in the United States against Owens, alleging she spread false claims that Brigitte Macron was born male—claims the suit says Owens monetized through content and merchandise. Politico+1
You don’t have to take anyone’s partisan word for it that “misinformation is her business.” You can observe the incentive structure: controversy creates clicks; clicks create subscriptions and sales; the content becomes a product line.
4.1 The “satire becomes news” loop
One of the most common forms of low-grade misinformation today is not elaborate forgery; it’s satire or junk content being laundered into “real” claims because people share before checking.
Reuters has published fact checks showing satirical stories misrepresented online as real claims involving Owens (for example, a satire story falsely presented as if she vowed to ban Taylor Swift from the NFL). Reuters
The influencer doesn’t need to invent a hoax from scratch; they can benefit from a viral ecosystem where bogus content circulates, then offer their audience an interpretation (“Look what they’re doing now!”) without doing the verification labor that would kill the dopamine hit.
4.2 Why this feels unoriginal: the talking-point conveyor belt
Owens’ content often operates in the same political meme space as other right-populist influencers:
- “They’re lying to you”
- “They hate you”
- “They’re coming for your kids”
- “Everything is inverted”
- “The establishment is collapsing”
Those frames are not unique to her; they are part of a broader rhetorical genre. That genre can be fed by mainstream reporting (selectively clipped) or by viral nonsense.
The unoriginality is not merely that she comments on news. It’s that she often performs the same ritual functions as others in the space:
- confirm the audience’s identity,
- provide villains,
- treat every counter-argument as proof of persecution,
- and convert outrage into revenue.
4.3 “Value” versus “membership”
Followers may feel they get value: confidence, community, a sense of being “awake.” But in a strictly informational sense—new verified facts, careful sourcing, correction practices—this genre tends to underdeliver, because accuracy is not the primary commodity.
The commodity is alignment.
5) Tucker Carlson: mainstream infrastructure turned into narrative laundering
Tucker Carlson is the most interesting case because he sits closer to the boundary between “legacy media” and the influencer ecosystem. He has held a prime-time cable slot, then transitioned into a broader creator-like model (podcasts, direct distribution).
His unoriginality—when it shows up—often has the form of high-status recycling:
- take mainstream coverage,
- take elite political messaging,
- take foreign propaganda narratives,
- wrap them in a “forbidden truth” posture,
- and present the result as independent dissent.
5.1 Dominion v. Fox: when the “just asking questions” era collided with a court
The Dominion lawsuit and Fox’s settlement remain a crucial reference point for evaluating the “unoriginality” and bad-faith dynamics of election-fraud content ecosystems.
AP reported Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement in 2023, avoiding trial. AP News
In coverage around the case, the judge overseeing it ruled it was “crystal clear” that claims about Dominion related to the election were false—a point echoed in reporting discussing internal communications revealed during discovery. The Guardian
That matters for your argument because it shows a central mechanism of influencer-style content inside a mainstream network: not producing new facts, but repeating politically advantageous claims because they perform well with an audience—then retreating when legal exposure arrives.
5.2 When Russian state media “likes” you, that’s not a compliment
In 2022, reporting discussed leaked Kremlin guidance that encouraged Russian state media to use clips of Carlson “as much as possible.” The Guardian
That doesn’t prove Carlson is “a Russian agent.” It doesn’t need to. The informational point is simpler and more damning in its own way:
- Russian propaganda benefits when Western voices validate or echo Kremlin-friendly narratives.
- Western influencer ecosystems benefit from “contrarian” narratives that turn geopolitics into culture war.
- The incentives align even without coordination.
This is the mechanism your prompt is gesturing toward: talking points and propaganda do not have to be copied verbatim to be functionally adapted.
5.3 Nord Stream and the speed of narrative uptake
One example of how Kremlin narratives travel is the “U.S. did it” framing around Nord Stream sabotage. Reporting noted Carlson raised the possibility the U.S. was behind the sabotage. Fortune+1
Analysts at institutions tracking propaganda dynamics have described how Russia pushed narratives blaming the U.S. and how far-right or influencer coverage in the West could be used to bolster that framing. Alliance For Securing Democracy+1
Again, you don’t need to claim Carlson is directed by Moscow. The unoriginality argument is about inputs:
- A claim emerges in a propaganda ecosystem.
- It is repeated by Western commentators because it’s provocative and audience-pleasing.
- Its Western repetition becomes a citation source (“Even Americans say…”).
- The loop completes.
That is narrative laundering.
5.4 The Putin interview: access without investigative posture
In 2024, Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin; the Kremlin posted the transcript on its own site. en.kremlin.ru
The question for “value” is not whether interviewing Putin is “allowed” or “taboo.” Interviews with adversarial leaders can be valuable. The question is whether the interview functions as journalism—challenging claims, testing evidence, triangulating—versus functioning as an event that generates attention and status.
If the interview becomes a content spectacle rather than a fact-finding operation, it can still be “original” as programming, but not original as reporting.
6) The Trump administration talking-point ecosystem as a content quarry
These influencers also adapt talking points from the Trump administration. This isn’t just about Trump as a person; it’s about a political-media symbiosis:
- A political movement generates repeatable slogans and enemy frames.
- The influencer ecosystem repeats them, dramatizes them, and keeps them alive between election cycles.
- The repetition creates the illusion of grassroots consensus.
- Politicians then cite the “public mood” that the influencers helped manufacture.
The 2020 election fraud narrative is the archetypal example. You can observe how claims originated and spread across political actors and media outlets, then became legal exposure in defamation litigation, and were treated as fact-like assertions rather than mere “opinion” in the court’s framing. AP News+1
The unoriginality here is structural:
- Influencers aren’t doing independent discovery.
- They are repackaging factional messaging as revelation.
- The audience pays for the feeling of independence while consuming a coordinated genre.
7) Why followers pay: the psychology of “epistemic comfort”
Followers pay but don’t get anything of value. Some followers would disagree; they feel they get plenty—validation, identity, entertainment, a tribe.
But if we define “value” in a civic sense—truthful information that helps you navigate reality—the influencer churn model often sells a substitute.
The substitute has four features:
- High emotional certainty (“You’re right; they’re lying.”)
- Low informational friction (no need to read long documents; no nuance)
- Personal intimacy (parasocial bond; the host “speaks for you”)
- A moral economy (“By paying, you’re resisting the system.”)
That is why unoriginality doesn’t hurt the product. In many cases it helps. Repetition is comforting. Repetition signals belonging.
The audience pays not for new information but for epistemic comfort—the relief of having a stable narrative in a chaotic world.
The Reuters Institute research ecosystem has repeatedly documented how publics worry about distinguishing truth from falsehood online and how influencers are viewed as significant sources of mis/disinformation risk. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk+1
In a fog, the loudest foghorn feels like guidance.
8) Julie K. Brown: what “original” looks like when you actually do it
Now put that against Julie K. Brown’s Epstein reporting.
This is not about aesthetics or personality. It’s about method.
8.1 The work was slow, local, and document-heavy
The Miami Herald frames Brown’s Epstein work as a year-long investigation that involved tracking down more than 60 women. Miami Herald+1
That number matters because it signals what influencer content almost never does:
- not just repeating claims,
- but building a pattern across many testimonies,
- cross-checking,
- persuading sources to talk despite fear and shame,
- and assembling the institutional story of how power protected a predator.
A Guardian profile notes the investigation initially faced limited interest and that Brown had pressure to stay on her beat, reinforcing how real investigative work is often not glamorous inside a newsroom. The Guardian+1
8.2 The output was not “a take.” It was a consequence.
The National Press Club describes Brown’s reporting as revealing a secret plea bargain that hid the scope of accusations and credits the series with contributing to a federal sex trafficking indictment and to Acosta’s resignation. press.org+1
This is a key difference in “value”:
- Influencer churn produces feelings.
- Investigative reporting produces institutional consequences—sometimes.
Not every investigation “brings down” a powerful person. Often it is ignored. But when it works, it expands the public record in ways that can’t be undone by vibes.
8.3 The budget contrast is real even when you can’t put a number on it
We don’t need an exact ledger to make the structural point:
- Brown was not running a giant network news division with unlimited resources.
- She worked inside a local/regional newsroom ecosystem and produced a national consequence.
Meanwhile, influencer ecosystems often have enormous revenue potential relative to their reporting costs because their core product is not reporting; it’s rhetoric.
And that is why they can afford to churn constantly: they are not paying the costs of verification, legal review, document retrieval, FOIA battles, and source protection at the same intensity.
9) A closer comparison: “information production” versus “information consumption”
To crystallize the difference, treat these as two economic roles:
- Journalists like Brown are information producers: they add new facts to the world.
- Influencers like Jones/Owens/Carlson are information consumers who monetize their consumption.
Consumers can still create value—curation, explanation, debate. But the critique you’re making is that these particular influencers are not curating responsibly; they are curating maximally monetizable narratives.
And here the “unoriginality” becomes ethically important:
- When you are not producing new facts, you are obligated to be careful with the facts others produce.
- If you instead select and distort, you are not merely derivative—you are parasitic.
That parasitism is visible when the influencer ecosystem attacks “the media” while feeding on it, and when it denounces “propaganda” while functionally laundering propaganda-adjacent narratives.
10) The Russian propaganda question: why “adaptation” is often more accurate than “copying”
Your prompt says these figures “adapt talking points from…Russian propaganda.”
That phrasing is smarter than claiming direct copying. Influence operations rarely rely on crude copy-paste. They rely on:
- selecting narratives that already resonate with a target audience,
- amplifying existing divides,
- and using local messengers whose incentives are independent.
Modern scholarship and policy analysis repeatedly emphasize that disinformation is a strategic tool in Russian doctrine and that propaganda ecosystems interact with foreign audiences in complex ways. publications.armywarcollege.edu+1
For Carlson specifically, the public record includes: Russian media interest in his segments, plus examples where his commentary aligned with or amplified Kremlin-friendly frames (Nord Stream being one well-discussed case). The Guardian+2Alliance For Securing Democracy+2
So “adapt” is a useful verb: a commentator can translate a propaganda narrative into domestic culture-war language without consciously “copying” anything.
That’s still unoriginal in the sense that matters: the narrative is not discovered through reporting; it’s imported, repackaged, and sold.
11) What the paying follower loses: opportunity cost and civic harm
Even if you grant that followers get entertainment and community, they lose three things:
11.1 They lose time that could have been spent on real information
The cost of low-value content is not only money. It’s attention—your most finite resource.
11.2 They lose the habit of verification
A steady diet of unverified sensationalism trains the brain to treat “feels true” as a substitute for “is true.”
UNESCO’s warning about creators not verifying content is relevant here not because “influencers are evil,” but because the ecology rewards neglect of verification. The Guardian
11.3 They lose institutional capacity, indirectly
When audiences shift money and trust from reporting institutions to rhetoric institutions, fewer people like Julie K. Brown get funded to do slow work.
A society can survive bad takes. It struggles to survive when it cannot produce reliable public records of wrongdoing.
12) A sharper moral comparison: who pays the price when they’re wrong?
This is the cleanest ethical contrast.
- When an influencer is wrong, the audience often shrugs, moves on, or treats it as “just asking questions.”
- When an investigative reporter is wrong, they can be sued, corrected publicly, fired, and their outlet’s credibility collapses.
But there’s an even deeper asymmetry:
- Influencer errors often land on outsiders—targets who didn’t choose the fight.
- Investigative reporting aims (at its best) to land scrutiny on those with power who are insulated by institutions.
The Sandy Hook record is instructive: false claims harmed grieving families, and courts treated those harms as serious enough to warrant extraordinary damages. Reuters+1
Brown’s Epstein reporting, by contrast, elevated victims who had been ignored and exposed institutional protection mechanisms. press.org+1
That’s the difference between an attention economy that consumes people and a journalism ethic that tries—imperfectly—to protect them.
13) What “value” looks like, concretely
If you were advising a reader on what to pay for, you could use a simple test:
Does this creator reliably increase the amount of verified information in your head?
- If they mainly increase your certainty without increasing your knowledge, you’re buying a mood.
- If they increase your knowledge by pointing you to documents, court filings, multiple sources, and corrections, you’re buying information.
- If they add new facts to the public record, you’re buying public service.
Julie K. Brown’s Epstein work passes the hardest version of this test: it did not merely comment on an existing scandal; it helped reshape the public record and contributed to renewed legal consequences. press.org+1
14) Conclusion: the unoriginality economy is profitable; the truth economy is expensive
Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are not interchangeable people. They differ in tone, platform history, and specific claims. But your critique lands because it’s about the role they play:
- They thrive in a system where commentary substitutes for reporting.
- They often harvest mainstream facts, viral junk, factional messaging, and sometimes propaganda-adjacent narratives.
- They monetize attention while externalizing the costs of being wrong.
Julie K. Brown represents the opposite pole:
- slow work,
- documentation,
- victim-centered sourcing,
- institutional accountability,
- and consequences that no influencer “take” can replicate.
In the end, “unoriginality” isn’t a stylistic flaw. It’s the signature of an industry that sells certainty without earning it—and sells outrage without paying its moral debts.
