The Olivia Nuzzi RFK Story is an Indictment of America's Incestuous Media

Meet The People Who Sleep and Socialize Together At All Hours And Then Pretend to Cover One Another Objectively

Yes, I wonder why.

The rise of Olivia Nuzzi as a journalist started with getting called a “slutbag” for her approach to worming her way into the Anthony Weiner mayoral campaign, only to turn around and write an expose for the New York Daily News — and her reputation for skirting the lines of journalistic norms, particularly about flirtation and using relationships to get ahead, has followed her throughout her career. But what a career! Magazine awards before she turned thirty, gaining a reputation for writing big profiles of the politically powerful, whether drinking Bloody Marys with Rudy Giuliani, cataloging Steve Schmidt’s rants, slipping into Corey Lewandowski’s house, or painting Steve Bannon’s shirt kink like one of your French girls.

These profiles consistently have three things in common: they are consistently filled with juicy gossip designed to set people chattering, they routinely lack a full insight into the subject, and they are almost always about older men, who she forms direct relationships with via text messaging, to the point of liking memes about her ability to navigate around handlers and get directly to the principal. Her capability at this hasn’t just led to a star turn as a writer, but boosted her prominence in television and even Hollywood, too. She went from critiquing Kate Mara’s depiction of a female journalist in House of Cards to showing up in the same place, herself.

So when it came out late last week that Nuzzi had been suspended from her job at New York magazine for failing to disclose that she’d developed (or pursued) a digital (at least) sexual relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., it trended online in a way that few other journo-politician relationships ever would. Like any typical Nuzzi profile piece, there was juicy gossip, a powerful man with a big name, a story full of texts and rumors, the side drama of a broken off engagement with fellow journalist Ryan Lizza (19 years her senior) who’d left his wife and two kids to be with her, and that nagging feeling that some key piece of information was missing from the overall narrative.

Jessica Reed Kraus, the phenomenally popular Substacker and RFK friend, dropped a neutron bomb of a piece that, despite her obvious pro-RFK bias, lays out disturbingly stalker-like behavior on Nuzzi’s part.

The Talented Ms. Nuzzi

Friends of Kennedy believe Nuzzi set him up. They recount that just two weeks after New York Magazine published her article, she made a flirtatious remark during a phone conversation. In response, Kennedy blocked her number. A few weeks later, Nuzzi emailed him, asking to be unblocked, claiming she had urgent information about a hit piece being prepared against him. He unblocked her for that conversation, but later that night, she sent him a provocative picture, prompting him to block her again.

For most of the next 8 months, Kennedy kept her blocked, except for a few occasions when Nuzzi contacted him from different emails and phone numbers, insisting he unblock her for urgent discussions about an imminent hit piece. Once unblocked, she bombarded him with increasingly pornographic photos and videos that he found difficult to resist. After brief exchanges, he would block her again.

Whether this is accurate or not, who knows. Much as I’ve been an advocate since the beginning of taking RFK’s run more seriously — as it represents something truly different in our politics and that in a Biden-Trump race it could’ve determined the electoral outcome — I’ve only met him once, haven’t interviewed him, and don’t know if this is spin designed to cover for a deeper mistake. But I do think there’s a takeaway here, and it serves as a reminder for how deeply incestuous most political-media relationships are. The behind-the-scenes intimacy of shared studios and green rooms — seeing the same people day after day and developing a history and friendship with them — serves to lower the needed barriers that enable reporters to cover people fairly and politicians to keep from being used or manipulated by media figures who get closer than they should.

Most people on the center-right talk about media bias from an ideological perspective. They shouldn’t. That ideological corruption exists, of course it does. But the deeper bias is toward a different form of elite duplicity, a bacchanalia of manipulation — of politicians, of media, and most of all, of the consumer who doesn’t know any better about what’s really going on.