Counterpoint: Fucking Your Sources and Subjects Is Bad!

Last week was a historic week for horniness in American politics—so much so that I had trouble covering it all. There was North Carolina Republican governor nominee Mark Robinson’s years of porn forum posts leaking, the most depraved activity a human can engage in even before you get to the messed-up shit he said, moral panic creator Chris Rufo’s e-mail showing up in an Ashley Madison data dump, and Matt Gaetz’s very serious sex trafficking allegations surfacing again, this time in court.

But I could not get to word breaking that famed profile writer (on leave) for New York Magazine, Olivia Nuzzi, had a complicated sexting relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man running for president whom she has profiled. Thankfully for this historic run of horniness we find ourselves on, the American press has kept this story alive while advancing it further than a middle school-level sext scandal should go. In a logical country, “this was bad, and her journalism is degraded for it” is all the oxygen this would receive, but unfortunately we don’t live in that world, we live in one dominated by a media class servile to American power, whom Nuzzi has made a career out of profiling.

Thou shalt not shtup your subjects and sources is one of the ten commandments of journalism, and after Rupert Murdoch, is maybe the best explanation for why the British press has devolved into one giant self-fellating circus. If you cannot understand how having sex with your sources compromises your journalism by introducing an entire universe of conflicts of interests, then I can only assume that you have not gone through puberty yet.

Or maybe you’re a high-profile mainstream American journalist like co-founder of Semafor Ben Smith and many others who are framing this as barely a mistake, as he wrote today:

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!”

The first part of Smith’s paragraph addresses a core truth that would be worth pursuing if we were capable of having an honest discussion about media in this country, as the relative motivations of sex, career aspirations, etc…are worth investigating as to their impact on reporting—but “sex barely rates” sounds like something an angsty teen might say at a party where their friend is getting laid.

My man, this is America, sex literally sells here.

This is a classic example of the Beltway believing that we only think with our heads, which led them to fundamentally miss the rise of Trump. If we did, I might still be doing sales right now instead of washing out into journalism. Emotional appeals are how you get things done in the United States, as Kamala Harris’s vibes-based determination to be the most generic Democrat who ever generically Democrated proves, and sex is one hell of an emotional appeal.

Citing the utterly depraved and amoral British press in your what’s the big deal blog really puts the cherry on top of this denial sundae. That’s like a vegan comparing themselves to Hannibal Lecter.

The litany of mainstream pundits and reporters lining up to defend Nuzzi’s supposed minor mistake are telling on themselves, and as the writer Moira Donegan notes, a lot of these same people backing their favorite rising star weren’t so charitable during Felicia Sonmez’s battle with The Washington Post over covering the #MeToo movement.

Where does a conflict of interest arise for a woman reporter? One rule seems to be that such conflicts are acceptable when they advance men’s interests and prerogatives of sexual access, and unacceptable when they challenge them.

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) September 23, 2024

George Carlin famously said of America’s “owners” that “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” This scandal with Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. reveals who is and is not in that club. For most of us, the myriad conflicts that arise from sexual interactions with people who are intrinsic to our own work are generally accepted and the barriers between them are enforced. For people close to power like Nuzzi, it’s apparently not a big deal. After all, who among us when we were young and naïve and engaged to someone else at the age of 31 didn’t vigorously sext with a 70-year-old man with a brain worm and a dead bear cub in his trunk?