Olivia Nuzzi is an Embarrassment to Journalism

She seamlessly landed a plum role at Vanity Fair and got a sweetheart book deal after breaking a fundamental journalistic ethics rule.

When my co-host Christine Grimaldi and I recorded our October 2024 episode of Cancel Me, Daddy titled "Sexting with Mr. Brainworms," I had hoped it would be the last time I would have to comment on "political journalist" Olivia Nuzzi. We did the episode in the immediate aftermath of revelations that she had an "emotional affair" with anti-vaxxer and then presidential candidate RFK Jr and it was the epitome of our podcast's ethos of thoughtful analysis and verbal shit-posting.

But yesterday fresh news broke, in a blog post from her ex-fiance, fellow "political journalist" Ryan Lizza, alleging that she had slept with 2020 presidential candidate Mark Sanford. Instantly the political side of online social media erupted, with thousands of what my former rescue squad father liked to call "looky-loos" rubbernecking at the latest personal car wreck to come out of this woman's private life.

I was one of them.

At first, my thirst for gossip overcame me, and I texted the story to everyone I knew who might know who she was, dying to chat shit about it. Nuzzi and I used to be mutuals on Twitter long ago and we even DMed with each other once. For as long as I've been a journalist, Nuzzi was someone that people looked up to, though I never thought her work was particularly interesting. It always felt like she was just playing to either fame, or power, or maybe both.

To me, her prose was more like what a dumb person would imagine good writing to be. Everything was overly florid or unnecessarily catty, as if anticipating cheers from an arena while it's being read out loud.

The excerpt from her new book featured in Vanity Fair Monday did little to disavow my assessment.

But then yesterday turned into today, and I thought more about Lizza, a man with his own MeToo allegations in his past and who is 19 years her senior who was almost my age when he started dating a 22 year old Nuzzi (his current girlfriend is currently a 20-something). Then I saw 66 year old Keith Olbermann talking shit on BlueSky about his former relationship with Nuzzi, who might have been a teenager when they started dating approximately 14 years ago (do the math, it's all gross).

We are in the middle of a massive scandal of social and political elites palling around with one of the most infamous child sex traffickers in the world, and this is our political press? No wonder Epstein got away with it all so long, many of the men tasked with being the watchdogs were almost as gross as he was with women.

Suddenly my eagerness to consume drama soured, and I mostly felt sadness for Nuzzi. How many middle aged (and older) men have pursued her? Has she ever had a normal age range relationship with anyone?

As a teenager, she put out a song titled "Jailbait," and that seems like the last stage of personality development she ever hit.

But sleeping with a source is a hard no-no. Sleeping with a subject you're writing about is even worse in my opinion. Sleeping with two subjects you're tasked with covering should be disqualifying. Despite what Semafor's Ben Smith says, not only is it icky, but it compromises your whole body of work as a journalist.

Now I'm not someone who believes that journalism is this perfect profession where everyone always has to have spotless ethics. Ethical conundrums pop up all the time, even for someone like me.

Last year, about this time of year, I was in Sweden covering the Overwatch World Championship Series for Defector and the PR rep I was working with at the event offered me an event-related sweatshirt worth about $70 retail and I turned it down because I felt accepting it would compromise my ability to write honestly about the event.

But Nuzzi's poor decision-making sours public trust in her work, the work of the publications she works for, and ultimately the public's opinion on journalism as a whole.

If an article subject or source thinks that sex with a journalist is possible, they are more likely to give you increasingly salacious information until they hit paydirt, but you can't trust that any of it is legitimate. Men lie to women all the time for sex.

Also, you simply cannot write fairly about your subject if there has been intimate relations there. If you're covering an extended race, like a presidential election, you can't be trusted to cover the people competing with your love interest. If you're a political journalist that keeps "falling in love" with the politicians you're tasked with covering, you're a fucking shitty journalist.

Why should we ever trust anything Nuzzi (or Lizza now that the two of them are having a literary mid-off with each other) ever writes again? Why should we trust anything Nuzzi edits again?

Nuzzi was recently named an editor at Vanity Fair, where she published an excerpt of her new book and was recently featured in a glossy New York Times profile. Editors have broad influence over the work they're overseeing, and she could easily strike an unflattering detail about Sanford or RFK Jr.

But editors don't get bylines at Vanity Fair, so there's no way to know which work she's touched there.

Maybe we shouldn't trust any political coverage that comes out of Vanity Fair.

See how quickly reputations fall apart when you're enamored with a "political journalist" with questionable judgement and a track record for ethics smashing behavior? The taint rubs off on anyone and anything she comes in contact with.

In a time when the journalism industry is crumbling, it shouldn't be the Nuzzis and Lizzas of the world getting put on a pedestal. There are too many hard working journalists barely scraping by to justify all that.

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Best,

-Katelyn