In the half-week since news that New York magazine suspended star reporter Olivia Nuzzi upon learning that she had and hid a months-long inappropriate relationship with failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many of the most powerful people in journalism are asking, rhetorically, Why are people making such a big deal about this? That's not a question to be dismissed out of hand simply because other people also happen to be mad at Nuzzi for stupid reasons.
Dead-eyed hacks like Caitlin Flanagan and Chris Cillizza have made their predictable cases, as has former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief and New York Times media columnist Ben Smith. Smith, of Smith & Smith Media, addressed the scandal in a confused edition of his newsletter over the weekend. Against the "full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness," Smith's defense of Nuzzi is that to draw the ethical line at engaging in a sexual relationship with a reporting subject is arbitrary, and that the work of reporting is inherently compromising:
Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.
You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
Semafor
This is not the defense he thinks it is. The Nuzzi–RFK Jr. story is not, as much as Smith clearly wants it to be, a story about cancel culture, or left-wing neo-Puritanism, or pearl-clutching by uptight ethics cops too naive or ignorant to handle how the sausage gets made. It is not only, or even principally, a story about journalism ethics in the abstract, but rather about Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. in specific. That is, it's the story of one of elite media's name-brand access journalists—one who often makes use of that access to hang with and launder the reputations of a cadre of odious figures—crossing one of the brightest ethical lines to pursue, and then hide, some sort of intimate relationship with not just any old reporting subject, but a self-evidently deranged fringe clown with a voice like Tickle Me Elmo going through a woodchipper.
It is a story of hubris. I think it's possible for readers to simultaneously find the RFK Jr. camp's targeted leaking against Nuzzi offensive and mildly slanderous, and still find incredible the story of post-2016 access journalism's fash-curious golden child getting in trouble for a months-long secret affair with the grim walking tapeworm hotel at the end of the Kennedy dynasty.
Smith has it in him, after glibly dismissing as normal the affair itself, to end his post with a line about how Nuzzi should have told her editor about the relationship earlier, in service of keeping up appearances. This suggests appearances are the only thing at stake here: Nuzzi's reported eight-month sexting relationship with a key figure in her coverage isn't inherently out of bounds, but her failure to gird herself and her editor against the Censorious Left or whatever is. The underlying idea here is that a journalist is a prism, someone without thoughts or ideas, an essentially refractory object.
But Nuzzi, like any journalist, has thoughts and ideas. Here's one, which she shared with Semafor in early September, before this story broke:
When I write something that agitates the right, I am accused of being a liberal activist. When I write something that agitates the left, I am accused of being a conservative activist.
The difference is that mainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right.
Semafor
I would have loved to read about the Nuzzi-RFK affair, and the idea that only left-coded smear campaigns ever work, on Gawker, a website that was killed by a bad-faith campaign against reporters led by the right.
The context for that quote is the aforementioned stupid reason some were mad at Nuzzi: her story about the "conspiracy of silence" around Joe Biden, published shortly before Biden dropped out of the 2024 election campaign. As Smith revealed, Bloomberg canceled a big PR effort to promote a show Nuzzi was making for them, after "a group of Democrats on Twitter" got online "to call her a racist and tweet at Bloomberg demanding she be fired." The quote has made the rounds over the past few days, as Nuzzi's apologists have worked to paint that backlash onto the clowning and opprobrium coming her way in the aftermath of the RFK Jr. revelations, as though the former explains the latter.
Like that backlash to the Biden story—which advanced the indisputably correct position "Joe Biden is not up to this shit," shortly after everyone else on Earth not pot-committed to dragging Biden's carcass across the electoral finish line had reached the same conclusion—this framing is flattering to Nuzzi, and by extension to her entire class of creepy access merchants. The cheering at her (potential) downfall is much more comfortably dismissed if one imagines it being led by those threatened by her courageous journalism, rather than those long disgusted by the same ethical vacuity (and affinity for conspiracy-peddling right-wing freaks) now laid bare for all to see.
Here's how Nuzzi finished that above quote:
But a large part of my project as a journalist is to meet people where they live in gray areas and to run toward complication and nuance.
Semafor
It's a nice image: The brave gumshoe reporter, charging into the burning building to bring down deeply nuanced and complicated truths like "Donald Trump has charisma" and "Joe Biden is old."
The most sympathetic reading of this, in the context of all in which Nuzzi lives, is a defense of nihilism, which is A) not worth defending, and B) a lie. There is an entire gross class of elite journalists who see themselves as coterminous with the political elite they cover. It's a big party, and you're neither invited nor welcome to question what happens there. Of course they have beliefs; one of the most ardently held is that you are stupid enough to think otherwise. This is the stuff they feel they have to say to keep it going: How else can the public hope to get quotes about wokeness or whatever from a guy who thinks vaccines can make your organs transparent?
