Don't sext with RFK Jr.

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Olivia Nuzzi Did a Bad Job 

BEN SMITH, THE co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor, wrote an item in his newsletter this morning that offered what he called a "slightly contrarian view" about the news that New York magazine had suspended its political features reporter Olivia Nuzzi after the magazine learned she had been having a sexting affair with third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Disclosure: Ben Smith and I were colleagues at the New York Observer and remain in intermittent, cordial contact, and we once had an inconclusive discussion about whether there might be any jobs I could do at Semafor. 

Smith wrote: 

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!”

Disclosure: Heather Havrilesky and I are friendly; we have promoted each other's newsletters and I helped promote her most recent book; she sent me a gift when she read my essay about being underemployed and ill. Disclosure: New York magazine published that essay, one of two big freelance pieces I've done for them and which both sides hope will be followed by more; the editor in chief, who would go on to suspend Nuzzi, sent me a nice note when the essay ran. 

With that established, Smith and Havrilesky (Ben and Heather?) were totally, meta-scandalously wrong on this one. Nuzzi's infraction was a gross violation of the ground rules of journalism, yet far from being contrarian, Smith seemed to be expressing a widespread point of agreement among a set of well-connected journalists: that the Nuzzi scandal was somehow overblown, that a gifted and valuable reporter had made a minor misjudgment for which she was being wrongfully shamed.