'Bananas', 'bonkers & bullsh*t': NPR's David Folkenflik on Olivia Nuzzi, Ben Smith and journalism ethics

When alt right commentator Benny Johnson was recently caught up in an indictment alleging the US media company for whom he worked was being funded by a Russian government-backed entity, many couldn’t help but reminisce about his time at Buzzfeed. Johnson was hired there in 2013 by then-Editor in Chief Ben Smith, who was interested in bringing a more conservative voice to the millennial-driven newsroom. I should know; I was there.

At the time I was a publicist in the nascent news organization that would soon become a force in politics. It was my first media job and my last in PR, and though I only lasted seven months before getting fired, the experience was formative. Not least of all because I had the opportunity to see a veteran like Smith—someone who’d go on to become a Pretty Big Deal in the news business—up close at work. 

Smith is, as NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik put it in a conversation we had Monday night, “a serial news entrepreneur”, and now helms Semafor, a political news and gossip site he co-founded in 2022. In the publication’s media newsletter Sunday night, Smith shocked the journalism community by writing a “contrarian view” of the ethics surrounding the sordid tale of New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi’s recently revealed sexting relationship with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources,” Smith wrote. “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.”

Nuzzi, in his telling, was being unfairly criticized, and blamed American journalist’s “prurience and self-righteousness” for her public excoriation. “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?” he wrote. On Monday he tweeted this was merely a joke. So why is no one laughing?

In an email to Semafor’s communications team on Monday I asked, “Is it company policy that reporters are allowed to have romantic/sexual relations with sources as long as they disclose it to their editor? Does Semafor, as a news organization, condone the trading of sex for information?” So far, no response. I reached out to Smith via Twitter and Signal on Monday but have not received a reply.

Folkenflik has covered media for NPR since 2004 and has recently been on top of the story of Will Lewis, a British media executive with questionable ethics who now serves as the CEO and publisher of the Washington Post. In 2018, the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Folkenflik its Ethics in Journalism Award. I knew he’d be the perfect person to speak to about the audacity of Smith’s column and the implications of Nuzzi’s behavior.

Read our conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity. And please, subscribe to The Handbasket.

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: So just to be clear, you did read Ben Smith's newsletter from last [Sunday] night? Is that right?

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, NPR: I did.

KABAS: So it was about ethics, and specifically in the context of Nuzzi/RFK Jr. scandal. What was your initial perspective on the ethics involved in the story and about having a relationship with a source?

FOLKENFLIK: Understanding that we don't know all the details here, there has been an admission of a personal relationship between a reporter and the subject she covered shortly after the commissioned profile of the subject appeared. That was not disclosed for many months and appears not to have been disclosed until it was instigated by the editor of the publication himself. 

Focusing on the journalistic side of it for a second, there's really kind of a couple of compounding errors involved here. Or real lapses. And they go something like this: It's one thing to become involved with somebody or forge a friendship or a close relationship with somebody after having written about them with the idea being, hey, I'm never gonna write about this person again, but there was a spark, the heart wants what the heart wants, and there you go. But Nuzzi continued to write about presidential politics. While it was clear that there was essentially no path for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to win either the Democratic nomination or the White House, there was the notion—not inconceivable—that he could play a spoiling role. And indeed, he went on to endorse one of the two candidates and rejected his own party in doing so. And Nuzzi wrote major pieces about both Trump and Biden in the months that followed, during which time she apparently was involved with RFK Jr.

Over the course of the summer, RFK Jr. was noodling publicly as was Trump about the idea of serving in a significant role, influencing health or vaccine drug policy for a new Trump administration, seeking some sort of contact with Harris to explore whether that would be possible in a Harris administration, working to get on board her campaign. So the idea that Nuzzi wasn’t interested in RFK Jr. as the explicit focus of her reporting and therefore people didn't need to know about it, it's just a failure to understand the full scope of the lapse involved, right?

KABAS: Right.

FOLKENFLIK: And to not share that with editors is to fail to equip them with the information that they need to make a judgment, whether or not it coincides with your own as the reporter of the propriety of this and how to manage it. Conflicts of interest pop up, and there are times where journalists have involvement with people who intersect with the news. And yeah, these are things that have to be managed. They are often banned by certain kinds of codes. But it doesn't mean people have to necessarily lose their jobs, but it may affect the scope of what they're able to do. And that's part of the price of being a grown up. 

So I think that her statement, while getting, to some degree, at the dismay that her colleagues and peers may feel upon learning about it,  doesn't fully address the gravity of the circumstances. She is a high profile writer from a very early point in her career with what is now a very esteemed and influential publication with access to people at the top echelons of electoral politics. So these aren't just college pranks.

The other thing I would say is that I do think there's something to the notion that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is 39 years older than she is and has a self-professed history of acting inappropriately towards women. He had been until recently running for the highest office of the land, and therefore it does not appear from the outside to be just a one-sided set of bad judgment. Again, I think people deserve to have their own private lives. And if the two of them had wanted to pursue a private relationship, absent her staying on the beat of presidential politics, that's just not my business. And relationships work out, they don't work out. Not my problem.

KABAS: Right. But like you said, she has access to so much power and influence, and that's where it becomes tricky.

FOLKENFLIK: She was covering power and covering politics and covering influence. 

KABAS: This has brought out a lot of different opinions from people. At first there was a general consensus that it was not a good look, that she did the wrong thing. But then other people started circling the wagons to protect her. Then Ben Smith writes this newsletter. I was wondering what you thought about his idea that a sexual relationship with a source is sort of a tertiary concern as compared to the fealty as he says, that we as journalists feel to sources? And is it true that, like he says, American journalists haven't really reckoned with this?

FOLKENFLIK: Ben's a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I've got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they're writing about or whose world they're writing about, but they fail to disclose—the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we're all in bed with each other”—is bonkers and bullshit. And it's not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it's not actually how journalism should be conducted in the UK either. And I've spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well. 

So I think that it's fun and clever to say that this isn't important, but of course it's important. It affects what you think, it affects what you're doing. My feeling is you can do almost anything as a journalist that you're willing to disclose to your editors, but also to your audiences. And if you're uncomfortable disclosing it to your audiences, maybe that's a sign that it's something you shouldn't be doing. 

And the reason that that information was withheld was that Nuzzi knew it would be compromising, problematic and probably disqualifying. Ben writes at the end of his thing, “before I turn in my badge, I have to say you should tell your editors” about a personal relationship with a source. He’s right. Now what he doesn't say is, “and your editors will probably take that decision out of your hands and say you've gotta change beats, or you've gotta do something else.” 

There are certainly people who went back to look at her coverage to either discern whether there was some bias in her reporting and writing, or just simply to accuse her of it because of a couple of pieces she wrote—like the piece that relied essentially on unnamed sources to ventilate concern among democratic voices about Joe Biden in early July shortly after his disastrous presidential debate performance. It certainly lands differently when you know right around that time she was in some ways emotionally, romantically involved with a guy who was coming out against Biden and deciding to embrace Donald Trump. On the other hand, it seems to me, through reporting by the Wall Street Journal and just the events we saw play out in front of our own eyes, we know those concerns were real and that Democrats did feel that way.

KABAS: Well, that's Smith's assertion, that the defense of the story is that it was true. And do you think that it's fair to say that truth ultimately trumps ethical concerns?

FOLKENFLIK: It's hard for me to go back, reread that story and say it's obviously the result of her bias as a result of her personal ties. The fundamental premise is unquestionably true. The fundamental expectation of the readership, however, is that even if magazine writers for New York Magazine have some voice or even some world outlook that they are going to be independent and fair-minded in how they approach these stories and not have any unacknowledged entanglements that may pull them even by a degree in one direction or the other. 

KABAS: What do you think of this attitude of “as long as it's true, it doesn't really matter how you get it”? What do you think this says about Semafor and Smith as a journalist? Does this call their integrity into question?

FOLKENFLIK: I think Smith is smart and lively and often has something to add to the conversation. He helped create Buzzfeed News, which for a while was a real benefit. And Semafor as well. But Smith also published, and to this day stands by his decision to publish, essentially the unexpurgated Steele Dossier. Now he acknowledged to readers not all of it could be verified, but he tried to get into what parts were hard to verify. So on the one hand, kudos for transparency. On the other hand, I think that's a really irresponsible thing. And I think it played very much into the belief attributed to the media at large by both fans of then-President Trump and people who were not wild about Trump's opponents that the press was just there to get him. That they had it in for him and that they would apply different standards than they would apply to others. 

Ben is a controversialist. He's very canny, he's very smart and he's done a lot of things quite brilliantly. But I think it's useful for Semafor to cut against the grain. And by defending somebody who's very much part of sort of this new establishment in journalism, he's taking a seemingly controversialist stance, although it's one that ultimately results in him standing up for somebody who's coming under attack, who is beloved or at least respected by a lot of folks in the political and journalistic pantheon. So it's not as controversial as the way in which he took it, which seemed a little naughty.

KABAS: After hearing Smith seemingly condone this type of unethical behavior, how do Semafor readers trust the publication from here?

FOLKENFLIK: I think it is fair for readers of Semafor, if they so choose, to question what the ethical standards are after reading this. I don't think Ben means it literally. I think he just means it to make a larger point of the self-seriousness of American journalism. But he's doing it at the expense of some form of clarity about what standards he's applying to his own work.

KABAS: Do you think Smith would think this conversation we're having is an example of the piousness of American media? Like, are we proving his point?

FOLKENFLIK: Maybe. You know, you'd have to ask him that.