D.C. journalists who chimed in on social media to defend their colleague Olivia Nuzzi, who this week admitted to a secret relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., drew outrage and ridicule from fellow journalists for missing the fundamental ethical lapse in her behavior.
“Nuzzi was in a romantic relationship with one of Joe Biden’s opponents WHEN SHE WAS REPORTING & WRITING this highly critical article about Biden,” Jennifer Schulze wrote on X, referring to this article published in July. “That is journalism malpractice full stop. Any media types who say otherwise also have questionable ethics.”
Among those defending Nuzzi are her New York Magazine colleague Andrew Rice, former CNN commentator Chris Cillizza and Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan.
On Thursday, it came out that Nuzzi, NY Mag’s star Washington correspondent, was on leave after admitting the affair with Kennedy to editor-in-chief David Haskell. The magazine insists it has found “no evidence of bias” or any inaccuracies in her reporting during the nine-month period when the affair took place, but it has hired an independent third party to investigate more thoroughly. Read more about the matter here, here and here.
In a statement posted Friday on X, NY Mag’s Rice wrote in part, “I have worked closely with my colleague @OliviaNuzzi for years now, and I have learned in that time that she is an impossible-to-discourage reporter, a lovely writer, a generous collaborator, and a magnet for hatred. She is also an empathetic human.”
This provoked a laconic response from “Matter of Fact” host and former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien:
Rice also attracted more thorough rebuttals
“The Wire” creator David Simon, himself a former journalist, responded with his typical fury to a Nuzzi defender who attempted to paint the situation as purely a personal matter.
“Mook, there used to be a standard by which if a reporter showed up at a politician’s fundraiser and there was an open bar, we didn’t drink or we threw a $10 bill on the bar so we weren’t so much as free-sipping the guy’s bottom-shelf gin. F–king the people we were covering and not immediately copping to it and departing the beat was a firing offense. You know, ethics,” he wrote.
This prompted a wave of enthusiastic agreement.
Flanagan weighed in on the matter twice. “I’m supposed to care about this? Here we have a brilliant reporter with impeccable prose and a matchless ability to find a riveting through line in a story. This is a nothing burger,” she wrote Friday afternoon. Several hours later, she angrily compared criticism of Nuzzi to Donald Trump’s “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” outburst. This provoked similar reactions to the ones Rice received.
Cillizza was treated to a particularly enthusiastic pile-on after writing, “On @Olivianuzzi: 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? Don’t write people off. The arc of a life is long.” That included quite the dunk from former Vox journalist and current Substack star Matt Yglesias.
There have, of course, been plentiful examples of direct criticism for Nuzzi and her defenders.
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