| Last Thursday night, as I was poring over the latest draft of Matt Belloni’s peerless What I’m Hearing newsletter, an email with a very interesting subject line popped into my inbox. A few weeks earlier, the journalist Oliver Darcy had decamped from CNN to launch his own independent project covering the media business, dubbed “Status”—a rumspringa, of sorts, from his previous perch, where he had helmed the nightly Reliable Sources email after his old boss and pal Brian Stelter was memorably defenestrated by former C.E.O. Chris Licht.
Shortly after Oliver’s launch, of course, Brian returned to take back his old job—a mitzvah in some ways, but also perhaps the latest sign of an industry in need of reimagination. Anyway, the nightly media email turf battle between the friends and former colleagues seemed like a net benefit for their overlapping audience. How could they not try to outdo one another on a daily basis?
I’d enjoyed Oliver’s early iteration of the product as he found his footing, but the subject line of Thursday’s email suggested that he’d landed his first news-cycle–shifting, albeit prurient, scoop. “Olivia Nuzzi on leave from New York magazine after RFK relationship,” it read—the latest bizarre and unprecedented plot twist in an already batty election season. Within minutes, Oliver’s story was everywhere.
The unfolding saga was, in so many ways, a uniquely Washington scandal—one that played on all the town’s intellectual and erogenous appetites, as well as its professional animosities. It was at once legitimately serious national news (R.F.K. Jr., despite his nuttiness, was a presidential candidate, after all) and local gossip fodder (Olivia Nuzzi and her now ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, both of whom I know a bit, are Washington famous). And it was, unequivocally, a tabloid story, too. Nuzzi, after all, had sent Kennedy some intimate selfies—a weird and distinctly modern twist on traditional matters of the heart.
Unsurprisingly, the piece ignited myriad tribes, both inside Washington and on the coasts. Media observers wondered how Nuzzi, who had been mum about the digital relationship while covering the presidential race for New York, could retain her job. Others questioned why Nuzzi was being raked over the coals while Kennedy, who is both married and now a top Trump surrogate, seemed to be getting a pass. Amateur historians wondered if this was a Gary Hart-level political bomb or something far more parochial, especially given Kennedy’s fringe candidacy and the non-physical nature of the relationship. (In a statement, Kennedy emphasized that they had only met in person once, when Nuzzi wrote a profile of him.) But, honestly, these complaints and observations were almost derivative. The fever-pitched fascination with this whole sordid affair said more about our culture than it did about any of the principals involved. (A Friday afternoon New York Post story about love-bombing merely underscored the fixation.)
There is a reason why the line between tabloid culture and our politics has irrevocably blurred: That’s apparently how most Americans want it. The upstairs, downstairs nature of this particular interpersonal drama was also notable—revealing, not for the first time, the tacky inner monologues of our ruling class. The Daily Mail’s infatuation with the scandal mirrored perfectly the rapture among the Gang of 500 crowd in Kalorama, Bethesda, and on Capitol Hill. In fact, as my partner Tara Palmeri noted in her brilliant piece Inside Trump’s Brain: Nuzzi, Corey & Unbridled Confidence, the former president, himself, has become obsessed with the story despite many other very pressing concerns on his agenda as he seeks to retake the Oval. (To wit: his flagging national polling, the Mark Robinson crisis, infighting among his top officials, etcetera.)
In a pair of excellent pieces this past week, Dylan Byers tried to capture the beating heart of this very D.C. scandal. In We Need to Talk About Olivia & Ryan, Dylan tacitly acknowledged a crucial shift in our culture. In the old days, politicians were stars and the people who covered them were often just an anonymous byline. As we know well here at Puck, where my colleagues are among the most august journalists of their generation, that dynamic has been flipped.
Dylan’s excellent follow-up, All the Nuzzi Fit to Print, also examines the sexism laced through the D.M.V.’s reaction to the whole thing. Yes, obviously, Olivia shouldn’t have been reporting on Biden or Trump while engaging in a relationship with Kennedy. But recent scholarship of these sorts of scandals demonstrates how women suffer disproportionately, and for far longer. Alas, for better or worse, this was a story of our time, and this sort of hermeneutical examination is precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
