Olivia Nuzzi & the Bright Young Things of Selfie Journalism

It's all about them.

New York Magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi has been placed on leave for engaging in what has been described as a “personal relationship” with RFK Jr. In recent days, however, we’ve learned that far from a personal relationship – which implies mutual respect and consent – Nuzzi has allegedly been obsessively pursuing the former presidential candidate, including by repeatedly sending him pornographic content (presumably of herself).

If there’s any questions as to where the “personal relationship” verbiage came from, there shouldn’t be. In a note to readers, New York Magazine wrote:

Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

This is quite a claim given that the magazine is only now investigating, via an unnamed “third-party,” what really happened. What’s clear is that Nuzzi and RFK Jr. have only met once. A source told the New York Post, “[Nuzzi] went after him aggressively,” the source said Saturday. “She targeted him pretty hard. Bobby was blocking her continually. It was a little scary. She was obsessed with him. I think she still is.”

Imagine the gender roles were reversed here and a highly influential national reporter was obsessively pursuing a female politician, including by sending her porn. Is there a world in which New York Magazine describes this as a “personal relationship,” and not stalking or sexual harassment or sexual misconduct?

In reality, New York Magazine is spinning the events — and the media is playing along. Which is all par for the course. But the bigger issue is a rising trend of 20-somethings — Nuzzi was hired by The Daily Beast while she was still in college — who get rocketed to the very heights of journalism.

We’ve seen this with CNN national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, who was similarly hired right out of school as a leading national reporter writing for Business Insider, Atlantic and Politico. Bertrand, who at 32 is just one year older than Nuzzi, has been responsible for disseminating some of the more pernicious stories in the Russiagate affair, many of which are flat-out false.

It got so bad that even Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple took Bertrand to task for her reporting on Russiagate:

With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the [Steele] dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances. Her written work has appeared on Business Insider, the Atlantic and Politico, where she is now a national security reporter. Along the way, she bootstrapped her punditry into a contributor’s role on MSNBC.

None of this mattered — just as it didn’t matter that Nuzzi’s reporting on Trumpworld mostly amounts to high school gossip strung together by snark. What mattered, and what still matters, to these outlets is the right contour of a journalist, the right look, the right social circles, and enough stories that seem to be scoops to keep the news brand trending.

In this regard, there are few better models for this approach than Taylor Lorenz, who similarly rose to prominence in her early 30s, with scoops that could generate buzz even if they often fell apart on closer inspection. Like Nuzzi, Lorenz has demonstrated a pronounced difficulty in sticking to basic journalist professional profile ethics. She has been caught lying about sources, about comments she made about Joe Biden, and, of course, about the subject matter of her coverage. I did an in-depth profile of her in the Spectator in which I wrote:

Lorenz again made headlines when she tweeted that she had been “relentlessly” harassed by an editor from news super-aggregator the Drudge Report who, she alleged, threatened to ruin her career. Matt Drudge, a famously reclusive figure, personally contacted Lorenz directly to clarify that he “never contacted her, nor has anyone associated with Drudge Report,” CNN reported.

There’s a trend here, a pattern. A young, often female journalist with the right look (let’s be honest: the right looks) and a good-enough resume, starts reporting audaciously on stories at the very center of American public life. Even when their stories go sideways, the reporters fail upward — and up and up.

The reason it because we live today in the era of the Bright Young Things who come pre-packaged for social media, equipped with a vocabulary of snark, and unafraid of taking what would have once been seen as wild professional risks, like sexting national politicians (Nuzzi), peddling Clinton campaign disinformation (Betrand), or lying about some of the most powerful people in tech (Lorenz).

All this calls to mind the purveyors of journalistic transgression of a previous generation, journalists like Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter on a rocketing rise in the early 2000s who was brought down by his own fabulism and plagiarism, including, as I showed in The Gray Lady Winked, by making up stories about American servicemen coming back from Iraq emotionally broken; Stephen Glass, the New Republic writer who was caught making up stories whole cloth; and Jonah Lehrer, the impossibly urbane twenty-something writer for Wired and New Yorker who, among other things, was caught making up quotes by Bob Dylan in his book on creativity.

Unlike Glass, Blair and Lehrer — all of whom saw their careers in journalism go up in flames — Bertrand, Lorenz and (in all likelihood) Nuzzi have only gone up and up. Because it’s not the ethics these news outlets care about. It’s getting caught. And right up until that moment, what matters most is the clicks, the eyeballs, and the buzz.

But while the Bright Young Things live it up online, the news industry is being driven to new lows, with trust in media nosediving. It all resembles nothing more than the parties of excess, the brilliant days of decadence, preceding the crash. But no one cares. This is selfie journalism, and the star social media journalist is far more important than the subject — never mind that formerly all-important person, the reader.