The scandal of American political journalism

Here’s an excerpt from the strategy memo that Olivia Nuzzi wrote on behalf of her virtual sex partner Robert F. Kennedy, while she was writing acclaimed and influential content on behalf of the candidate who would make her sext partner one of the most powerful and dangerous people in America:

“Your SOTU response is an imperfect but instructive comparison. While I thought the publication itself was mismanaged and mistimed and as a result it did not achieve a mainstream media/broader demo breakthrough like it could have, it still succeeded long term. It was not an attempt to manufacture a rival SOTU. It felt authentic and you came across as presidential (there were too many cutaways from your face, however, which bothered me personally for private reasons related to my feelings about your face, but also as a minor but important strategic editing error: people who are not yet familiar with you need to make an approximation of eye contact with you when you speak DTC; you need to hold their gaze). In this case, I would offer news of whatever you decide to do as an exclusive to Fox, and as a condition of the exclusive, dictate that they must include on the chryon and at the beginning and end of the segment explicit directions for how people can watch the event, and they must run an accompanying news story on their website where the same information is emphasized at the top and bottom of the page. (Watters would be my first choice. If he doesn’t go for it, I would forget primetime and offer it to Fox & Friends, The Five, or Outnumbered.) If Fox turns it down, I would offer it to Piers in conjunction with the Daily Mail, with an agreement about how long the story must stay on their homepage, and since they have British media ethics you can probably dictate — carefully — other terms about the tenor of the story. If they turn it down, which they won’t, as they love any excuse to use the “EXCLUSIVE” banner, Newsmax or News Nation as a last resort (former has about 4x the viewers, depending on the show, but I know you have a good relationship with the latter and they are a better fit ideologically; Cuomo is most popular, as luck would have it). I would also leverage every relationship you have with podcast hosts and ask them to hype the event and tell people how they can watch it, too. If you have the volunteer bandwidth, you should go as far as to have volunteers in swing states contact nursing homes, campus political clubs, rotary clubs, etc. to arrange for them to stream your event live. Every screen counts.

“You are the best candidate, and the people who already know that came to that belief because they respect you and your ideas. Focus on your ideas. Just as you know what’s best for the country, you know best what you should do on your campaign, and whatever you decide, you’ll be great. I love you”

Again, Vox Media learned of this sordid affair, knew of the widely read anti-Biden and pro-Trump profiles she published, and quickly concluded that she should be affirmatively cleared of any wrongdoing.

Not that it will stop anyone already locked into this narrative, but as Michelle Goldberg observed even before these receipts surfaced to see this as a “sex scandal” rather than a journalistic scandal is myopic nearly to the point of delusion:

If you are interested in politics, the evasions in “American Canto” are maddening. In response to Nuzzi’s attempted reinvention, Lizza has been serializing his version of the story online, and he has alleged outrageous violations of journalistic ethics by his ex. Perhaps the most serious is his claim that Nuzzi used her reporting skills to unearth potential negative stories about Kennedy so that he could quash or pre-empt them. Lizza may not be a reliable narrator, but her book suggests these charges are at least partly true, making the whole episode a serious journalistic scandal hiding inside a frivolous sexual one.

She describes alerting Kennedy, whom she calls “the Politician,” to an emerging story about him dumping a bear cub carcass in Central Park, and instructing him to get ahead of it. Thanks to her intervention, he posted a video of himself telling the story to Roseanne Barr before it was reported in The New Yorker. Even as she covered the 2024 presidential campaign, Nuzzi was secretly acting as Kennedy’s adviser. “It was not my place or interest to tell him what to do, but to be helpful and supportive while he weighed his options,” she writes.

An odd thing about the book — one that gives it an aloof, affectless quality — is that Nuzzi doesn’t seem to recognize that her collaboration with Kennedy was a grave professional betrayal. She blames Lizza, whom she refers to as “the man I did not marry,” for making her private life public as part of a harassment campaign against her, and seems to believe that by firing her, New York was complicit. The magazine, she writes, “had been spooked into participating in what I considered a siege of hyper-domestic terror.” Her total lack of introspection, at least on the page, is vaguely uncanny.

Throughout the book, she casually drops information about Kennedy that, if true, would have been of great public interest before his Senate confirmation hearings to become the secretary of health and human services. A former heroin addict, Kennedy is officially sober, but according to Nuzzi, he does psychedelics for fun. She writes that he is “not good in a crisis” and “did not handle stress well.” Toward the end, she writes, almost as an aside, that he had a frightening temper. “The man who yelled was not the man I thought I knew,” she writes. “The man who yelled was the man others had told me to fear.”

Really not great, Bob.