A Media Scandal for an Age of Unaccountability
The Oliva Nuzzi–Ryan Lizza saga is a window into how ethical rot, distorted incentives, and the naked pursuit of power define culture right now.
Happy Thanksgiving week y’all. For this week’s newsletter, I want to take a look at an all-timer of a media scandal, which speaks to our current structures of information distribution and power — two of our focuses at Hard Reset.
Some background, for those not paying close attention: Olivia Nuzzi, a young star journalist, lost her job last year as New York magazine’s Washington correspondent after it was disclosed that she had a relationship with RFK Jr. during his presidential campaign. In doing so, she broke one of journalism’s fundamental rules. But roughly a year later, she’s back in the news, having started a glossy new gig as Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor. A book about the whole RFK Jr. ordeal, which Nuzzi claims to have written mostly on her phone while hiking, hits the shelves next week. Cue the inevitable Styles section profile about her comeback.
But then her ex-fiance, politics writer Ryan Lizza comes out with a serialized, drip drip drop release of more scandalous details about Nuzzi’s RFK affair on his own Substack. Lizza and Nuzzi were living together when the RFK Jr. scandal broke containment, and they got into a messy legal spat over the whole thing, so Lizza’s disclosures are perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt. They are extremely personal and salacious. But they also call into question much of what has been released thus far. Ultimately the dispatches, the latest of which was released on Wednesday, allege serious journalistic transgressions that resulted from the affair.
Nuzzi has yet to respond publicly or give her version of events.
But according to Lizza: Nuzzi had a “near-total obsession” with RFK, to the point where she helped squelch the disclosure of embarrassing information to the media on his behalf, advised him on debate strategy and prep, helped him push the Biden administration for a Secret Service detail, and revealed sources who had trusted and confided in her, all while employed at New York magazine. At the very least, there is the potential for everyone involved in this — Nuzzi, the current HHS secretary, and the magazine, which cleared Nuzzi’s work last year after a third-party investigation found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” — coming away with even more egg on their faces. And this time, it might stick.
Still, there’s a certain type of person out there in the Elite Thought Precincts online who likes to act like they’re above this story, that it’s just salaciousness — or worse — dressed up as seriousness. But I don’t buy it. And Wednesday’s allegations about misconduct make that argument even more tendentious.
The knives are out in media circles in part because Nuzzi had been given the type of opportunities that are increasingly a fantasy for most writers, after years of downsizing and layoffs have left many out of work and cut the industry down to size.
“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,” reporter Karen K. Ho told writer Marisa Kabas in her newsletter.
You could also argue that the infatuation with access alleged in Lizza’s dispatches was evident in Nuzzi’s reporting, which often seemed more enamored with scene and status — and the attention it would generate — than shining a revealing light on power. (Consider how this early presidential campaign profile about Trump holds up now. Or this puffy piece on Kellyanne Conway.)
Second, the excerpt of her book released by the magazine, indulgent but ultimately evasive, wannabe-Joan Didion prose that descends into meaninglessness fairly quickly, raised the question about exactly what were the talents that had propelled her, in near record time, to the top of the industry. The most charitable interpretation is that writing such a book must have presented an existential dilemma: penning 70,000 words about a major episode in your life is a tall task if you are unwilling or unable to examine it with honesty, openness, or curiosity. Even with the Santa Ana winds at your back.
Then there are the very real journalistic sins. Not sleeping with sources is one of the industry’s cardinal rules. To paraphrase legendary New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal: nobody cares if you f*** elephants, as long as you don’t cover the circus. But covering the circus in D.C. was her job. (Nuzzi maintained the relationship with RFK was not physical, but Lizza’s dispatches are pointing another direction.)
And sex is not the reason why the old news editors forbade these kinds of relationships. It was because of the concerns that it would influence the coverage, of course. “Olivia had essentially become a private political operative for Bobby Kennedy, while publicly posing as a hard-nosed reporter,” Lizza writes.
These are not victimless transgressions: others have noted that Nuzzi’s writing about RFK glossed over his vaccine extremism and helped normalize him for the mainstream.
“In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute told The New Republic. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”
Lizza also hints at some potentially explosive details on the way, alleging Nuzzi sent a hidden tape recorder into the White House with a sketch artist who was going to be drawing Trump — and that the tape recorder may have captured rumblings about Trump’s attempted assassination?! Hey now. Lizza says we’re only halfway through the story.
But I do have some empathy for Nuzzi. She excelled at two critical aspects of the work that Serious News Editors like to pretend don’t exist: drawing attention and being welcomed into the right rooms, which are often as important as getting it right in a for-profit media industry that is constantly toggling between its need to attract eyeballs and its mission to inform.
Ultimately, I see this as a perfect parable for our time. It’s a tale that blends age-old temptations of vanity, ambition, and betrayal with the tech-induced dynamics of a culture that converts everything into currency: attention, attraction, and power. A story in which institutions are weak and degraded, ethics are corroded to the point where many question if they even exist, and dishonesty carries no consequences. This is the age of unaccountability, where those who violate our most basic norms, steer us into ditches, and hasten our decline, continue to fail upward. Status and proximity to power are no longer a means: they’re the end goal. If that’s not newsworthy, I don’t know what is.
Here’s what else I’m reading this week:
On that note, Anand Girandhas of The Ink newsletter had a fascinating piece in The New York Times where he went through the Epstein emails to unpack the hidden mores of the privileged elite.
People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.
Amid the constant talk about who’s too far left or not — is this what the political spectrum looks like to the average voter? It may be just a silly meme, but I think there’s more truth in this than not.
This piece, by financial analyst Michael Green, really took off after making the argument that the income poverty line is actually around $140,000. Green’s argument is, essentially, that the federal poverty line is calculated around food costs, even though food expenditures have dropped dramatically as a share of people’s budgets, while other costs — health care, rent, childcare and others — have surged. He runs his own numbers and lands there. Worth a read.
I dived into the viral “Death of the Corporate Job” discourse this week in my spare time, a few months behind. More to mull over later but I felt like this seemingly pro-worker argument — that many employees are useless in corporate structures, and therefore should start taking more time for themselves — is actually a smokescreen, unintentional as it may be, for more hyper-meritocratic, capitalistic purges a la Elon Musk, Twitter, DOGE etc. In short, hell. I liked this piece in The Republic of Letters Substack which pushed back against the idea and took the literary-inflected long view that bullshit jobs are not a new phenomenon at all.
Another smoke signal to decipher in the continual talk about an AI bubble? Michael Burry, the hedge fund investor who correctly predicted the 2007 housing bubble — and was featured in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short — has joined Substack and is taking aim at Nvidia and the financing behind AI. He’s already got more than 86,000 followers.
See you next week!