Nuzzi, Haberman, and becoming the story

It’s better for journalists to cover the famous than to be the famous.

Just last week, during an online seminar on how journalists should cover politics, I gave attendees a key piece of guidance: Don’t make friends with politicians. 

Olivia Nuzzi could’ve used that advice.

Nuzzi’s employer, New York magazine, put her on leave after she admitted to a relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while covering the presidential campaign. We don’t know many details. When media writer Oliver Darcy broke the story last week, he said their relationship was “romantic.” New York magazine called it “personal.” Nuzzi herself said it was “never physical.” 

By all accounts it was inappropriate, and it lasted for months. This is not a gray area in journalism. Reporters are supposed to avoid and disclose conflicts of interest. If Kennedy made inappropriate advances, Nuzzi should have written about it. If she was the one who overstepped, she should have resigned. If the personal relationship was welcomed by both of them, she should have gone to her editor and asked to be taken off the story. 

New York magazine claimed that "an internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias.” But wait a second. During the time Nuzzi was “personal” with RFK Jr., she argued in a New York Times piece that the media was “ignoring something rather important” – Kennedy’s candidacy. And she wrote a blistering piece in New York magazine about one of Kennedy’s opponents, headlined “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”

There’s nothing wrong with journalists wanting to cover famous people. But there is something wrong with journalists who want that fame to rub off on them. 

The Washington Post said Nuzzi was known “for occasionally making herself the center of a story.” She has a brash, vivid, dear-diary style. It’s what I call “look-at-me journalism.” Writer Jeremy Fassler criticizes Nuzzi for focusing on “palace gossip and snark,” with a tone that Fassier calls “meangirling.”

When I share the phrase “meangirling,” I don’t want anyone to think there’s anything inherently female about this approach. Some of Nuzzi’s writing has the over-the-top gonzo style made famous by Hunter S. Thompson. And there are plenty of men committing abuses of access journalism, such as Bob Woodward keeping Covid facts secret in order to protect his arrangement with Donald Trump during the pandemic.  

While journalist misbehavior is nothing new, the Nuzzi scandal is particularly unwelcome because it comes a month and a half before a crucial election. Credible reporting is desperately needed as the news industry takes fire from both cynical propagandists and honest journalism watchdogs.

One of the magnets for criticism is the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, who may have more sources in Trump World than any other mainstream reporter. For that reason – and because the Times’ political coverage has been a huge disappointment – Haberman’s work has come under a microscope. As she herself put it, “Trump turns everyone into a character in his movie whether they want to be or not.”

Haberman said that in a 2022 interview with … Olivia Nuzzi. 

That interview was an example of Nuzzi’s performative edginess, including a question that included the word “motherf-----” and another about whether Trump’s hair had gotten “less weird.” Nuzzi showed her usual lack of professional distance, clearly sympathizing with Haberman. 

“Something about you activates people in weird ways,” Nuzzi told Haberman, “and there is no reporter — certainly no male reporter — who is accused of the same range of alleged sins, who faces such a regular tidal wave of obsessive backlash for doing their job.”

In an interview last week with NPR, Haberman said she and other journalists were being picked on by a left-wing “industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly.” And she declared: “I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump.”

Please. The media does not do a good job covering Trump. If it did, Trump’s lies about the economy, crime, immigration, energy, and countless other issues would not have gained such purchase among the public. Trump lies successfully because the people in the truth business are doing a lousy job.

That said, I don’t think Haberman is the main problem at the New York Times. A lot of what she gets pilloried for is the fault of the Times’ leadership, including Publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Executive Editor Joe Kahn, who have set a course of euphemism and bothsidesism. Fact is, the Times’ headlines are significantly worse than the news stories under them, and Haberman doesn’t write the headlines. I have yet to see evidence that she’s crossed the line in dealing with her Trump-savvy sources. 

I do have complaints about Haberman, though. She often fails to give readers the context to help them understand the people she cites in Trump’s circle. For example, she sometimes refers to Trump ally Bernard Kerik simply as “the former New York City police commissioner” when she should say he’s “the former New York City police commissioner who served three years in prison for tax fraud.” 

At times Haberman writes as if she’s coaching the Trump campaign, such as: “Mr. Trump needed to paint Ms. Harris as responsible for the pain that voters have described feeling. Instead, he described a bleak America and talked about himself.”

There’s also a matter-of-factness about Haberman’s work that may seem like steady professionalism to her but comes across as normalization. Haberman writes about Trump with familiarity and sometimes even exasperation – he’s the crazy uncle showing poor judgment again. She needs to be sharper – to consistently depict him as a dangerous threat to our country. Because he is.

Haberman further infuriates her critics when she dismisses them as a leftist “industry.” But when those critics focus on her instead of the Times’ leadership, it makes the newspaper’s weak approach seem like an isolated personnel problem when it’s really an institutional failure.

I don’t know what would happen to Haberman if Trump regained the presidency and followed through on his authoritarian threats. If she was truly in Trump’s pocket, as some say, she’d do fine. But I’m not convinced things would go well for her.

Nuzzi, on the other hand, will find plenty of opportunities, no matter what happens with our politics. If you can turn a clever phrase or persuade Rudy Giuliani to let you tag along with him on a boozy adventure, there will always be an editor willing to hire you.