There are simply so many cringey issues in regards to the New York journal journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s inappropriate relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
To start with, he’s married. (The political scion’s spouse is the actor Cheryl Hines.) Second, Nuzzi is 31, and Kennedy, straying into Hugh Hefner territory, is 70. Third, she was till not too long ago engaged to the political journalist Ryan Lizza, who was “MeToo’d” in 2017, when the New Yorker dismissed him for what it described as improper sexual conduct.
Other than prurient curiosity, why ought to any of us actually care?
New York suspended her for violating its requirements on “conflicts of interest and disclosures,” in line with an unsigned word to readers on the journal’s web site. “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust,” it mentioned.
Whereas engaged within the relationship with Kennedy — which she mentioned started late final 12 months, after she wrote a profile of him, and led to August — Nuzzi continued to carry forth on the presidential race. In March, throughout a dialogue with the journalists Frank Bruni and Joe Klein printed by the New York Occasions, she castigated the “establishment press” for failing to deal with Kennedy as a critical contender in what she known as “a three-man race.” In July, the month earlier than Kennedy dropped out and endorsed former President Trump, she wrote a disparaging article in regards to the “conspiracy of silence” to guard Trump’s then-rival, President Biden.
Nuzzi’s habits didn’t merely cross an moral line. It ran full-steam throughout a freeway stuffed with warning indicators, flashing lights and oncoming visitors. Somebody — forgive the reference to different unusual RFK Jr. tales — is certain to finish up as roadkill. And it’s not going to be him.
Shocking defendersBizarrely, many journalists rushed to defend the indefensible.
“If we were all judged on our worst moments or our biggest mistakes, how many of us would come out looking anything other than awful?” the journalist Chris Cilizza wrote on X.
“‘I’m mad at Olivia Nuzzi’ is this Friday’s ‘I hate Taylor Swift,’ ” the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan wrote on X, referring to Trump’s remark after Swift endorsed Kamala Harris. “Beautiful women unsettle and disrupt. This isn’t yellow cake uranium.”
“Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources,” Ben Smith wrote in Semafor. “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.”
Oh, the world-weariness of all of it.
Whereas girls not often exhibit the predatory habits of males, they’ve definitely been identified to behave in sexually inappropriate methods at work. However their transgressions are often consensual.
To date, it’s not clear whether or not Nuzzi has inflicted a deadly wound on her profession.
“The relationship was never physical,” Nuzzi advised the media reporter Oliver Darcy, “but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict.”
An inappropriate relationship that’s “not physical” would possibly imply sexting. And sexting, I might recommend, is intercourse.
Making a monster
In 1992, a couple of years earlier than Invoice Clinton quibbled over the definition of “sex” in a deposition, Nicholson Baker wrote a steamy novel, “Vox,” a few sexual relationship between a person and a lady that takes place totally over the telephone. Throughout their affair, Monica Lewinsky, then a White Home intern, purchased a duplicate for Clinton.
The connection between Nuzzi and Kennedy was an open secret in sure media spheres, in line with Enterprise Insider. Kennedy, a one-time heroin addict whose second spouse as soon as discovered a diary through which he rated his varied sexual conquests, boasted to pals that Nuzzi despatched him intimate pictures. Phrase bought again to New York’s editor in chief, David Haskell, who confronted his star reporter.
I’m sorry that Nuzzi exhibited such poor judgment. She’s an entertaining stylist and simply plain enjoyable to learn. However she has performed her feminine colleagues a disservice by reinforcing probably the most damaging clichés about girls utilizing their sexuality to get forward.
In 2015, Nuzzi’s New York journal colleague Marin Cogan wrote a sensible piece utilizing the Netflix collection “House of Cards” to critique Hollywood’s portrayal of ladies journalists.
“In cinema’s first few decades, women reporters were spunky and smart romantic foils — Hildy Johnson in ‘His Girl Friday’; Lois Lane in the Superman franchise,” Cogan wrote. “Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, television gave us two women journalists — still spunky but way more independent — that we could root for: Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown. But sometime in the last 20 years, we became slutty ambition monsters.”
Nuzzi tweeted the piece out, asking, “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?”
Sigh. The jokes actually do write themselves.
Robin Abcarian is a Los Angeles Occasions columnist. ©2024 Los Angeles Occasions. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
