[Written 9/30/24]
Just as the Nuzzi story started to deflate, Ben Smith managed to pump it back up
I had hoped to avoid writing about last week’s big media scandal. We were scooped, to Max’s eternal regret, by Oliver Darcy’s excellent new newsletter, Status, after we ignored a Wednesday evening email from one “Anderson Jones.” Jones, an anonymous sender with an Iowa IP address who has since gone dark, had a “news tip”: New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi had disclosed to Vox she’d had a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ...
As best I can reconstruct the events, of the publications we know of New York magazine apparently had this story first but decided not to make a public statement. Semaphor was tipped off but decided not to pursue the story. Eventually Status eventually decided to run it but only with numerous caveats about how reluctant they supposedly were. The second case is particularly interesting. Vince Smith who founded the site was previously notable for publishing the unedited Steele Dossier, despite pretty much everyone knowing that it was filled with unverified and in some cases probably false charges. Smith's decision turned out to be a tremendous boon for Donald Trump and his supporters, allowing them to bundle all of his grossly inappropriate and very real connections with cooking into one big "Russia hoax." Smith seems to have rethought his "We have always erred on the side of publishing." credo since then (or perhaps he's just a huge hypocrite).
Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. 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.
You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
This is an absolutely stunning position for a journalist to take, arguing that the world would be more somehow better off without sources anonymously coming forward with information about wrongdoing. This is got to be the only time I have seen someone in the news industry responding to a story being broken by a by attacking the tipster.
This is the soul of the Shafer algorithm. You make up an entirely new set of rules for friends and colleagues and still somehow manage to take a morally superior tone.
Many of Nuzzi’s critics were furious at her over a July 4 story about members of Joe Biden’s inner circle who felt he was too old to run for president. How, these critics ask now, could she have done that story fairly if she had an emotional attachment to a fringe candidate?
And this is where two values of journalism part ways. The obvious defense of that story is that it was true, something few Democrats now contest (though the few that do continue to loudly fill up our email inboxes and Twitter mentions).
Some distortions here and at least a couple of major lies of omission. Smith misrepresents the reaction to the Biden story. It is true that there is now a strong consensus, even among Democrats, that Biden stepping down due to his age was the right choice, though that didn't really firm up until after the successful handoff to Harris avoiding the nightmare scenario of 1968 and her surprisingly successful campaign (even her supporters didn't expect her to do this well). The balance and fairness of Nuzzi's piece is a topic that is not addressed (I haven't read it so I have no opinion). It is also worth noting that Smith's suggestion that being noteworthy and true are sufficient reasons for publishing something raises serious questions about his decision to kill a story about a peer (maybe he switched back to his original credo mid-essay).
We could go back and forth from the Biden piece. It's much more difficult to justify Smith's decision to skip over all of Nuzzi's other more flagrant conflicts of interest with respect to Kennedy. We only have her very questionable word that the affair began after the profile was published. If it started during the writing of the article, we have the brightest of red flags. Even if we trust her timeline, there are still at least two occasions when she made extremely probed in the remarks in the editorial pages of the New York Times (still waiting for the paper of record to apologize for that, by the way). Still later came the puff piece "humanizing" Trump written while RFK Jr. was angling for a place in a Trump administration. This isn't a complete list – – we haven't even gotten into social media – – but it is certainly enough to make a damning case.
Fortunately, there are press critics who are having none of it.
KABAS: This has brought out a lot of different opinions from people. At first there was a general consensus that it was not a good look, that she did the wrong thing. But then other people started circling the wagons to protect her. Then Ben Smith writes this newsletter. I was wondering what you thought about his idea that a sexual relationship with a source is sort of a tertiary concern as compared to the fealty as he says, that we as journalists feel to sources? And is it true that, like he says, American journalists haven't really reckoned with this?
FOLKENFLIK: Ben's a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I've got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they're writing about or whose world they're writing about, but they fail to disclose—the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we're all in bed with each other”—is bonkers and bullshit. And it's not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it's not actually how journalism should be conducted in the UK either. And I've spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.
So I think that it's fun and clever to say that this isn't important, but of course it's important. It affects what you think, it affects what you're doing. My feeling is you can do almost anything as a journalist that you're willing to disclose to your editors, but also to your audiences. And if you're uncomfortable disclosing it to your audiences, maybe that's a sign that it's something you shouldn't be doing.
And the reason that that information was withheld was that Nuzzi knew it would be compromising, problematic and probably disqualifying. Ben writes at the end of his thing, “before I turn in my badge, I have to say you should tell your editors” about a personal relationship with a source. He’s right. Now what he doesn't say is, “and your editors will probably take that decision out of your hands and say you've gotta change beats, or you've gotta do something else."
The Shafer Algorithm is, of course, named for press apologist Jack Shafer. Here you can see how he dealt with the question "Is It OK to Sleep With Your Sources?" back in 2018.
(Disclosure: Watkins and I enjoyed a collegial rapport during her Politico tenure, but we never worked on any story or column together.)
...It’s never OK for reporters to sleep with their sources — or with elephants. Ali Watkins deserves a good scolding and professional reprimands if she crossed that line. But based on what we know about her case, she deserves a second chance. Given all the male reporters over the years who’ve escaped punishment for their sins of the flesh, it’s only fair.
And here you can see him addressing similar lapses with similar results again and again and again.
For those who haven't had enough of our original scandal:
Olivia Nuzzi accuses ex-fiance of orchestrating blackmail campaign amid RFK relationship
and
Three Women Say RFK Jr. Cheated on Cheryl Hines With Them
Based on this latter one, being a heroin addict who drives his ex-wife to suicide qualifies as "rambunctious."
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