The Olivia Nuzzi Scandal Is an Indictment on Journalism
Last night, Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter that New York magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi “allegedly engaged in a romantic relationship” with former 2024 third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Nuzzi had profiled for the magazine in November 2023, and defended in the press ever since. Nuzzi has since been placed on leave from New York.
Nuzzi, who first began writing as a teenager for the alt-weekly triCity News in the early 2010s, has been on an upward trajectory ever since. Over the past 11 years, she’s gone from blogging about her experience working on the failed mayoral campaign of Anthony Weiner, to landing a gig at The Daily Beast while still an undergraduate at Fordham University, to being hired by New York as their Washington correspondent in 2017. This year, her TV show Working Capital premiered on Bloomberg.
With credentials like these, you would think Olivia Nuzzi is another millennial wunderkind like Ronan Farrow. Upon closer examination, her writing reveals her as a real-life Regina George, less interested in analyzing the mechanisms of power than in palace gossip and snark. It may be great for Perez Hilton, but it’s hardly the kind of work that should be lauded as great journalism.
Take for example, an excerpt from this piece from last summer about Joe Biden’s failing memory, one of the most prominent in the avalanche of articles following his first debate against Trump. Nuzzi’s article catalogues Biden’s old-age lapses, while not naming any sources:
“In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors… Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years?… They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle…. Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
The piece ends with the most damning revelation of all (at least in her mind): Biden forgetting who Nuzzi was at a press gathering:
I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Writing a long piece based on claims from anonymous sources is dicey enough (and she’s not exactly protecting victims of sexual assault or workplace crimes here), but Biden’s so-called failure to remember her may have less to do with his memory and more to do with the fact that in 2021, Simon & Schuster cancelled the book deal she and her fiancée, Ryan Lizza, had for a book about the Biden Administration. Rumor was that the administration iced her out for her harsh coverage of Biden’s 2020 campaign, and while it’s best to take rumors with a grain of salt, it does play into the meme of Biden’s “Scorpio Petty.” It is hard to take her reporting at face value given this backstory, but that’s no matter to Nuzzi, who plowed ahead anyway despite obvious conflicts of interest (like being romantically involved with the guy running against Joe Biden.)
Then there’s her belabored prose style, as best exemplified in this excerpt from her recent article about Trump’s 2024 campaign and his reaction to the bullet that nicked his ear last summer:
An ear had never before been so important, so burdened. An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence as it had not been in more than half a century. Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less. Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.
Dictators throughout history have used surviving assassination attempts as proof of their invincibility; their very survival a sign of divine intervention (and Trump does use those words at one point in the story.) If Nuzzi cared to analyze this incident, she might frame it in this context, but this jumble of words says nothing about the former President and everything about Nuzzi’s hero worship of his strength.
And this is to say nothing about the decade worth of receipts on her untrustworthiness, which includes tweets fangirling over Ann Coulter and racist “jokes” about Barack Obama — not exactly signs of a journalist who would write honest coverage about Democrats or Republicans. (The re-emergence of these racist tweets last summer caused Bloomberg to cancel the PR rollout of Working Capital.)
The flaws in her work were on display for all to see. The flaws of her character were plain. The callousness and shallow worldview and meangirling were always there. And yet, despite all of this, journalists have praised Nuzzi and risen to her defense time and again. In 2016, she was named one of Politico’s Breakout media stars.” That same year, reporter Jay Lassiter called her “the best political writer to come out of New Jersey in a generation” in The New York Observer. (Lassiter expressed regret for this in light of the story.) In 2017, she made Forbes’ “30 Under 30.” In 2023, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award for a vapid report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Recently, she was praised for her “thoughtful” response to the racist tweets:
Even today, her colleagues and peers are rising to her defense:
And New York’s statement on Nuzzi is similarly defensive, saying that their internal review of her work has found any “evidence of bias,” as if there isn’t a mountain worth of evidence that she’s not on the level.
Nuzzi is not worth defending. She has never been worth defending. But journalists spent the better part of a decade protecting her, coddling her, encouraging her to write gossip and call it “news,” no matter what her critics said. And now she has become the embodiment of one of the most vile, hackneyed clichés in the book — the journalist who’s secretly involved with their subjects — and it indicts the entire profession itself. It makes us look like petty hacks who are less interested in informing the public than in letting subjects dictate our stories. We must use this moment as an opportunity to look in the mirror and re-evaluate what we value in our profession, and what we think is worth defending. If we do not do that, then we are truly lost.
