Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field

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The news of journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the married former presidential candidate and current quack Secretary of Health and Human Services, shook both the journalism and politics worlds when it broke in September 2024. Over the following year the story moved to the back-burner as a madman was allowed back in the White House to literally destroy it. But in the past week we’ve been reminded of this saga as Nuzzi promotes her tell-all book, her ex-fiance hits back, and even side characters try to get some attention. 

All the tawdry details aside, between Nuzzi’s ethical lapses, the revelations from the Epstein emails of journalists withholding information, and Trump’s continued degradation of the press, what’s been reinforced is a crisis of elite control of journalism and of profound rot. That rot appears in journalists in different forms: debasing themselves at the feet of power because it’s rewarded; allowing themselves to be debased by the powerful to maintain status and access; and identifying more with their powerful subjects than regular people because they believe it will insulate them from retribution. Each scenario reinforces how people behave differently under crumbling institutions than in a stable democracy: As rot spreads across journalism, politics, academia, law, and more, achieving success has become more of a riddle than a road map.

Last week, the New York Times published a glossy profile and photoshoot of Nuzzi, 32, in which she regales Jacob Bernstein—son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron—with tales of her year in “exile” after being fired by New York magazine. (In this case, exile involves living in Malibu and driving a Mustang, conditions of which most journalists could only ever dream.) The Times headline declares she “did it all for love,” but as one staff writer at another publication pointed out to me, it seems more like she “owed her publisher a book, lost her job due entirely to her own errors, had a lot of time on her hands and no job, wrote book, got paid.” On Monday Nuzzi published an “exclusive” excerpt of her forthcoming book on the website of Vanity Fair, the outlet where she’s now West Coast Editor. 

Through Nuzzi’s interview and book excerpt, we—fellow members of the press, and readers more broadly—are to understand that her journalistic malpractice was excusable because it was underpinned by genuine emotion. From Nuzzi’s telling, she was the victim of her emotions, and not of the way she behaved as a result of them.

“I mean to tell you as best I can what it was to face the unrealness,” one part of the excerpt reads, “to stand so close that it seemed at times almost plausible, to tiptoe along the edge of the abyss, and to balance there just long enough to forget that the plates would soon shift.” 

I called on other journalists—some dear friends, others internet pals—to help me parse through the mental knot this moment has created. Some were more than happy to share; others, perhaps afraid for their jobs or of risking their own spot in the journalistic pantheon, chose silence. 

“I feel cliché referencing George Carlin, but after a week like this what else can you say? There is a big club, and we aren't in it,” Dave Infante, an independent journalist who covers drinking in America in his newsletter Fingers, told me. “I turn down flacks trying to send me free booze multiple times a day, and invitations to all-expenses-paid junkets no less than once a month. I over-disclose potential conflicts of interest to the point where editors have made fun of me for it. 

Infante added, “This week, I yet again found myself wondering why I'm even bothering.”

Though Nuzzi has borne the brunt of this multi-pronged scandal, it’s important to remember that there are multiple people involved, and none come out of this looking good. RFK Jr., a man nearly 40 years her senior, carried on a digital affair with her while very much married to actor Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame (who incidentally also just published a memoir.) Then there’s Ryan Lizza, the former New Yorker journalist who was fired in 2017 for allegations of “improper sexual conduct” who was Nuzzi’s on-again-off-again partner for a decade—and 19 years her senior. And through Lizza’s salacious blog post published Monday night, he reminded us of another player: former ESPN and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann who dated Nuzzi when before Lizza while he was in his 50s. Lizza also alleges another, previously unreported, much older man was involved: Mark Sanford, the 65-year-old former South Carolina Republican Congressman who had a short-lived 2020 presidential bid that Nuzzi covered, and is best known for disappearing in 2009 and then lying by saying he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was actually in Argentina with his mistress.

Two things can be true: Nuzzi made some exceptionally poor choices for herself, and the parade of much older men surrounding her fancied themselves white knights trying to save her, all while actually taking advantage of her. Olbermann even thought it was appropriate to chime in about Lizza’s piece, which mentioned how he and Nuzzi had “hatched a plan for her escape” from her relationship with Olbermann. (When I suggested he sit this one out, he did not care for it.)

There are some stories where there are no winners—only losers. This is one of those stories.

The dueling missives from Nuzzi and Lizza show two showboats trying to out-detail each other, with maudlin prose dissecting a relationship that’s portrayed as tortured, but was really just between two careless narcissists. It belies an attitude of “maybe if I craft this artfully enough, my mortifying actions will have been worth something.” Never have two people appeared more committed to the idea that you can write your way out of a jam. 

Poor personal judgement aside, the whole Nuzzi/RFK Jr./Lizza et. al. fracas has created an even uglier picture of the current state of journalism, making it hard for ethical practitioners to do their jobs. What are young and/or struggling journalists supposed to think when the most successful people in the business are the ones with malleable ethics and poor judgement (and, to be honest, pretty bad writers)? How are we supposed to hold the powerful to account when our colleagues are romanticizing—and getting rich off of!—the concept of a sexual relationship with them?

Another female reporter I spoke to said that after the Times profile dropped last week, a male source joked about how she would never do that. “I didn't have the time to lose my mind at him about how he's the 700th person in my life to imply directly or indirectly that as a journalist I sleep with my sources because that's what all female journalists do,” she told me, “but it is a really tiresome trope and then it REALLY SUCKS when a female journalist ACTUALLY GOES AND DOES IT.”

There’s also a clear double-standard when it comes to which type of journalists are allowed to be (and rewarded for) being morally fluid, and who is held to a separate standard. And it’s not skill but gall that sets them apart. Their ability to slink into the world of the rich and powerful is no coincidence: their comfort in those spaces is a product of their identity, which also makes them prone to falling into the habits of the people they’re supposed to be covering.

“Any journalist of color I know with a tough childhood would not be given a book deal to write about blowing up their life and career to sext with a Kennedy and then a job at Vanity Fair,” business, culture and art crime reporter Karen K. Ho said. She pointed out how many journalists of color have recently lost their jobs at major outlets despite following all the rules, all while watching a journalist like Nuzzi flaunt them.

“Some people in the industry don't think ethics and rules apply to them—due to their desire for power and influence, pursuit of ‘friendship’ with sources, or a combination of some or all of those things,” Ho said.

This dynamic was made abundantly clear in a few of the thousands of emails released last week by Congress between deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and his many powerful associates—including journalists Michael Wolff and Landon Thomas Jr., who we learned both had information about Trump with relation to Epstein and kept it quiet. Wolff is probably best known for his 2018 book “Fire and Fury” about the first Trump presidency and is a current columnist and podcast host for The Daily Beast. Thomas was a financial journalist at the New York Times until his firing in 2019 for soliciting a $30,000 charitable donation from Epstein himself. It’s unclear what he’s been up to since then.

"In my opinion, one of the biggest revelations from the Epstein-Trump emails is that Michael Wolff—who calls himself a journalist—acted as a publicist and PR crisis manager for the most notorious sexual predator in recent memory,” Justin Baragona, senior reporter at The Independent, posted to Bluesky on Friday. Yet despite the revelation, Wolff has so far maintained his platform on the Daily Beast to A) explain away his misdeeds, and B) earn a paycheck, unlike so many honest writers out there. 

“It suggests that there’s an obvious shortcut through the hard work that goes into reporting fairly and accurately, which is to just create a spectacle,” Miles Klee, culture writer at Rolling Stone, said of the ethically-dubious work that’s been presented as journalism. “It’s not a coincidence that Wolff and Nuzzi both made their names by printing what is essentially gossip. Sure, a lot of it may be true, but what you’re really selling there is the concept of yourself with total and intimate access to everyone who matters, which makes you just as important, a byline that magazines can always bank on.”

The spectacle, of course, runs both ways. While taking reporters’ questions on Air Force One last Friday, Trump shouted at one, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!” The comment was reportedly directed at a female reporter who was following up on the question about Epstein she’d asked a few moments earlier, and the president’s declining brain thought it was appropriate to admonish her in this way.

It should be noted that not a single other reporter in the press pool spoke up to defend their humiliated colleague. This was hardly the first time Trump has berated a journalist, which makes it that much more shocking that no one was prepared to step in. Though they work for competing news organizations, these journalists travel as one. A little solidarity would go a long way—but it would also threaten the proximity to power. Just today during a press conference in the Oval Office, Trump told an ABC reporter, “I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and so wrong.”

Adding an extra cruel layer of irony is that Trump was seated next to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince who the CIA concluded ordered the grisly 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman was asked about Khashoggi Tuesday, and Trump even jumped in to defend him while viciously suggesting that the murdered journalist had it coming. 

And while we’re talking about double standards for journalists of color, Karen Attiah, who was the late Khashoggi’s editor, was recently fired by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s newspaper for speaking out against racist double standards in the media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Attiah called balls and strikes and was shown the door; exiled, even. Meanwhile, Nuzzi was handed the keys to future fame and fortune in spite of proving the ease with which she deceives, and perhaps because of her alignment with right-wing figures. The locus of power has never been more clear, or more consolidated.

When the Nuzzi/RFK Jr. story broke last year, opinions flooded the internet. Ben Smith, former Buzzfeed Editor in Chief and founder of the news and gossip site Semafor, clocked in at the take factory to share his perspective: “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.”

Naturally, I was repulsed by this response. So I reached out to David Folkenflik, the long-time media reporter at NPR, for his reaction. “I think that it's fun and clever to say that this isn't important, but of course it's important,” Folkenflik told me at the time. “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.”

As a kid growing up in the suburbs with a budding interest in becoming a journalist, being a staff writer at New York magazine was my dream job. The pinnacle of success. Once I entered the field, the dream continued to elude me, and to this day I haven’t had a byline published by them. That’s all to say, at one point in my life I would’ve given anything to have Nuzzi’s former job. While a few fortunate ones continue to live this former dream, I’ve come to realize that the markers of what make a successful journalist, while still flawed, are changing. There’s a clear path to notoriety that comes with its own rewards. But one of respect and of professional admiration is harder-fought, though [I hope] much more rewarding.