Search method.
Not a magic trick.

The sample

Ten national outlets.

AP, Reuters, CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, NPR.org, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, through August 23, 2026.

Only first-party articles, transcripts, live blogs, or broadcast pages counted. Search snippets did not. AP syndications counted as one reporting act. NPR member stations were outside the original national-domain sample; the independent replication searched beyond it and found material contrary coverage.

The queries

Distinctive facts, not vibes.

The coding

Four different outcomes.

Direct coverage states the material event or mechanism. Component coverage states an important part but not the cross-channel mechanism. Context absent describes an inspected page only. Not located means no qualifying first-party page surfaced under the recorded queries.

Contact, access, a proposal, and an executed transaction were never treated as interchangeable.

The corrected result

Network reporting existed.

An independent rerun located substantial network-level treatments from the Wall Street Journal, CBS, AP, and Washington Post. That contrary evidence defeated our original “architecture wasn't reported” framing.

It also found the Pritzker election-question text in WBEZ and other NPR-member-station reporting outside the original national-domain sample. The surviving negative result is narrower: no sampled treatment was located containing the specific strawman, Zug, trust-swap, option, debt, and ADR structure in the Epstein/Zeitlin Deripaska proposal, and none integrated every channel defined in this protocol. CNN did cover the underlying Epstein–Zeitlin–Deripaska contact and Bannon forward. “Not located” never means “never published.”