It's a Big Club, and You Ain't in It
It's a Big Club, and You Ain't in It
Elite legacy media journalists rush to the defense of the indefensible.
Last week, Oliver Darcy broke the news that New York magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi had been placed on leave after her employers learned that she had allegedly been involved in “an inappropriate relationship” with third-party-spoiler-candidate-for-president-turned-Trump-surrogate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The general response from the public seemed to be a resounding “ew” mixed with “Hey, this sure seems to put her past reporting on Kennedy, Trump, and Biden in a new light. Gosh, this sure seems wildly unethical that she was sexting one of the candidates the entire time!”
And yeah, I agree.
But a certain set of elite journalists and D.C. insiders were quick to jump to Nuzzi’s defense, letting people know that actually, it’s totally fine for a reporter to have an undisclosed romantic relationship with a candidate (whom she wrote a flattering profile of) while writing about the other candidates in the race (her most recent piece is an article about Donald Trump, the man Kennedy just endorsed).
On Monday, Semafor’s Ben Smith took this a step further by acknowledging that “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.”
And he’s right. I think the difference here is that I see that as a bad thing. I think it’s bad, actually, when reporters have to shade their coverage to stay in the good graces of their partisan sources. I happen to think the entire concept of access journalism is a blight on the press as a whole. But according to Smith, this is just the way it is, and that’s apparently A-OK.
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!”
Smith ends his piece by noting that “our policy here at Semafor is that if you’re having a romantic relationship with a subject of your coverage, for the love of God tell your editor.”
That seems inadequate. Maybe just… don’t get into a romantic relationship with the subject of your coverage? Or if that’s somehow impossible, get off the story? But no, apparently, it’s fine and dandy so long as an editor is kept in the loop while the public is kept in the dark.
At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, I’m not sure that circling the wagons in defense of some obviously unethical nonsense is the play to make. The scandal here has nothing to do with who she dates or sends photos to. I truly couldn’t care less. The scandal here is that she was doing all of this while presenting herself as a neutral observer of the presidential race. Suddenly, the piece about examining Donald Trump’s soul makes more sense, as Kennedy is fully Team Trump at this point.
So why do journalists at legacy media outlets do this?
Well, as George Carlin used to say, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
I went to the Mizzou J-School and I work as an editor for a trade publication and I feel like I'm losing my mind seeing all these people come out of the woodwork to say "actually it's fine to completely ignore all those ethics lectures you had to sit through."
I dare anyone defending Nuzzi on this to look me in the eye and tell me it still wouldn’t matter if it were Kamala Harris instead of RFK Jr. I’ll wait.
As for Ben Smith and his ilk, all I can say is that now we know what they think journalism is and what it’s for.