The Social World

Tag: Journalism

  • Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

    Olivia Nuzzi and the return of ‘celebrity journalism’

    There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.)

    The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.

    Colby Hall’s viral Mediaite column makes this case – journalism has all but collapsed under the weight of the internet’s vampiric demand for entertainment. For Hall, Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr. and the subsequent comeback tour represent everything wrong with modern media. It is a broken system that spent “years” – years, not decades – rewarding personality over substance. It is influencing by another name.

    Hall is right that something has been lost – fact-checking, rigor, objectivity, preparation, craft – I’ve made the argument myself. But he is wrong that journalism has ever been free of its Nuzzis. The “celebrity reporter who is also the scandal” is not a creature of the digital age. She – though, historically, more often he – is at least a century old. One might imagine the celebrity star reporter was born in tandem with the newspaper.

    In the 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal didn’t run “objective” institutional prose. They aggressively promoted voicy “star reporters” with huge bylines and promotional campaigns that would make a modern publicist blush. All that to say, the reporter wasn’t a medium for transparency and facts; the reporter was the product.

    Nellie Bly became a household name at the World for going undercover in a mental asylum – it was genuine reform journalism that also happened to be a sensation. But her most famous exploit was racing around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record. The World turned it into a national event – a spectacle – complete with a reader contest. The stunt had no news value. It was entertainment. Its entire premise was that the reporter herself was the story.

    Richard Harding Davis, only ten years later in the 1890s, offers an even starker example. Davis was famous for his war correspondence, yes, but equally famous for his good looks and romantic entanglements. Charles Dana Gibson literally used him as the model for the “Gibson Man.” Publishers marketed him, not his reporting – though that may have, incidentally, been valuable. But it was his face that sold papers. By the 1930s, Walter Winchell had perfected the form. His gossip column and radio show reached tens of millions; he could make or break careers, shape elections. Winchell was notorious for his personal life – feuds, an affair. He operated at exactly the nexus we’re told is new: tabloid sex, political intrigue and the journalist as main character.

    Wasn’t there a period when professionalism held? Cronkite, Murrow? Sort of. The norms we treat as timeless were largely innovations of the early 20th century, emerging for commercial reasons as much as ethical ones. The Associated Press needed to sell copy to papers of different political persuasions, so it developed a style that could offend no one. “Objectivity” was a business model before it was a philosophy.

    Even at its peak, the professional era was messier than nostalgia allows. James Reston of the New York Times was celebrated as the greatest Washington correspondent of the mid-century: “America’s conscience.” He was also a conduit for official leaks, so embedded with his sources that he would run stories by them before publication.

    The access journalism Colby Hall decries wasn’t an aberration from the golden age. It was the golden age’s operating procedure. Then came “new journalism”: Wolfe, Didion, Thompson, Mailer, Talese. They wrote brilliantly, but their work placed the self at the center of the story. Thompson covering the 1972 election was a drug-addled performance piece – though an insightful, well-written one. Mailer literally stabbed his wife. Talese had a very public affair while writing Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Nuzzi’s specific transgressions are her own. But the intensity of the reaction, the suggestion that her entire career was somehow fraudulent, misses the point. This is what it has always meant to play the gonzo game. The system that produced Nuzzi has been with us since the 1890s and so “fixing” journalism isn’t as simple as finger-wagging.

    So what has eroded? Because I agree Hall’s right, and it’s significant. But it’s not the impulse toward celebrity or self-promotion. Those are as old as the penny press. It’s the production of any real news at all – particularly vital local news stories. Newsroom employment has fallen by a quarter since 2008. The profession that once offered careers now offers gigs. Young reporters are told building a personal brand is essential to their survival, because the institutions can no longer protect them. The people investigating corruption or reporting the important news of the day aren’t usually the celebrities. Hall’s golden age had room for both, and occasionally for someone who could do both. Today we only offer success to one type. And it turns out that success is brittle.

    Nuzzi may have done real harm. She violated real ethical boundaries. She destroyed the sanctity of several marriages and her own relationships. She lit her own credibility on fire. But she didn’t invent the game she’s playing.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Was the BBC’s Trump edit outrageously wrong?

    Was the BBC’s Trump edit outrageously wrong?

    I should begin by making something clear. Splicing together two parts of a speech to give the impression they were one unbroken excerpt is a grave professional error, and would be viewed as such by any broadcaster in the business. The error would be egregious even if there were no suggestion it reinforced the accusation that Donald Trump was inciting riotous behavior, simply because what viewers thought they witnessed did not occur. There is no excusing what the BBC did to Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech.

    Nobody in the senior ranks of the BBC is to blame for not knowing about this at the time; but once it did become known, an immediate and unconditional apology should have been made. Crisply and severely dealt with, the story could have been contained, and it’s for their failure to get on the front foot after a bad mistake that the Corporation has deserved censure. Please, therefore, do not think me an apologist either for misconduct in the making of the Panorama program, or for the BBC’s handling of the scandal.

    But about the effect in practice of this splicing, I’m less sure. I’ve read verbatim the entire speech. It’s peppered with the imagery of battle. “Fight,” “fighting” etc occur throughout, and though the combative language may have been used metaphorically, the effect of the repetition is undoubtedly to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Though Trump did once (and only once) tell the crowd they were going “to peacefully and patriotically” protest, the violence of his language all through the speech, and his repeated suggestion that America itself was under attack and his and the crowd’s mission was to “save” the country – along with sentences like “We fight like hell! And if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more!” – can plausibly be interpreted as being calculated (in the legal sense of the word) to inflame the marchers. His later urging of his supporters to “remain peaceful” could equally be interpreted as implicit recognition that he had started a riot.

    I do not myself believe that Trump had a plan to provoke violence, but I do suspect he was careless whether he had that effect. I think too that, on the evidence, the accusation that he did know what he was doing would be fair comment on a matter of intense public interest.

    That, presumably, was the argument Panorama were rehearsing, and entitled to rehearse. And in doing so by splicing, they fell into a type of self-justification that does not infect the BBC alone but can be encountered everywhere in the media – though notably less in newspapers than the audiovisual media.

    Are you familiar with the word “truthiness?” The expression (I read) was invented by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report 20 years ago. He was making fun of media professionals who justify the purveying of untruths by explaining that if the purpose of journalism is to reveal a greater truth, then we may deploy a degree of artifice in our methods. If it feels true, if it conveys a truth without being itself literally true, then never mind the absolute truth: it has truthiness.

    Despicable? Do not imagine that the pursuit of truth through truthiness always feels outrageously wrong. Let me give you the most anodyne of examples, employed by the closest we have in Britain to a television saint: David Attenborough. Sir David once told me that, in a TV sequence showing reindeer migrating across snowfields in Lapland, long-lens cameras were used to zoom in on the herd from a considerable distance. Viewers would be able to see the reindeer close up. No problem with that. But if they were to be seen close up, viewers would expect to hear them close up too. For this, Sir David confided, dry custard powder and a pestle and mortar did the trick wonderfully. The sound, being almost indistinguishable from the real thing, had truthiness.

    I find it hard to get indignant about that. But this is a slippery slope. Attenborough had been criticized for taking us, his viewers, into a snow tunnel to see a baby polar bear nurtured by its mother. Well, mother polar bears do nurture baby bears in tunnels in the snow. But in the arctic, how would you get a camera in to capture the scene? So the program used a constructed maternal scene, viewed through a glass panel in a Dutch zoo, while Attenborough talked about the wild, which viewers thought they were seeing. I feel uncomfortable about this, but I reckon (and TV professionals reckon) most viewers would be fairly relaxed about not being told. The bear nursery we saw had truthiness.

    During the last century, in the depth of John Major’s troubles as Britain’s prime minister, the news media started using a photograph of him, head sunk in his hands. Sir John has told me he was in fact bored, and shielding his eyes from the lights while attempting a limerick on a notepad beneath the desktop. So the image’s implication was false. But it had truthiness.

    Down the slippery slope we go, until we reach Trump in that Save America speech. Its effect was incendiary: to inflame his roaring crowd of supporters (“We love you! We love you!”) they kept chanting. I’d submit that there was nothing dishonest about a documentary arguing that Trump was whipping his supporters into a riotous mood. That is believed by many. And he did shout: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you.” And then at another point in his speech he did shout: “And we fight! We fight like hell!” And if run together, you do get the impression he was at the very least careless about what he was starting. And if that is what the program–makers were arguing in good faith, then to them the splicing had truthiness. I too find the possibility truthy. But beware of that innocent-looking little y.

  • The battle for Anna Wintour’s Vogue empire

    The battle for Anna Wintour’s Vogue empire

    When Anna Wintour announced she was stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue in June, it appeared to be the end of the ice queen’s reign. Yet Wintour retained her large, chintzy corner office as well as her two other roles – as Condé Nast’s global chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director.

    If you looked closely, you might have seen a steely determination lurking behind her trademark sunglasses, the look of a generational editor intent on more power – and perhaps even revenge.

    The Condé Nast Union naively regarded Wintour’s move as that of a then 75-year-old drifting into quiet retirement, the old guard surrendering to youth. The union, formed in 2022 and seemingly run by the most radical young left-wing journalists in the company, has quickly grown in power and influence. But various Condé Nasties have informed The Spectator that the union has become a parasite which threatens to consume its host.

    When Wintour decided to close down Teen Vogue by folding it into Vogue.com – officially to consolidate resources – it was no surprise that a dozen angry young Jacobins from the union confronted the head of HR, Stan Duncan, about the layoffs of six staffers. However, instead of leaving with Duncan’s head in a basket, it was the four most vocally aggressive employees – lionized now as the “Fired Four” – who were guillotined: fired immediately and without ceremony. They learned the hard way that Condé is still a monarchy.

    And, according to insiders, Wintour is only just getting started. Condé has filed a grievance against the union with the National Labor Relations Board. Insiders believe Wintour and CEO Roger Lynch are planning to throttle it with litigation after finally making “a business decision to face down the union.” This is a fight the company must win, sources say, if it is to have a future.

    Those sources believe Condé has, “against its better judgment,” played ball with the union for too long. When the union threatened to form a picket line at last year’s Met Gala, the highlight of Vogue and Wintour’s social diary, Condé caved on the day of the event. The union, which represents more than 500 staffers at publications such as Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, won a $61,500 starting salary floor, $3.3 million in total wage increases and a host of benefits. Rather than assuaging the union, the agreement only emboldened its leaders. “The way the union won its settlement gave the members a sense of undue power,” one source said. “Some union members now go to work and they do their jobs – but only just.”

    Part of the problem is that members of the union are not given an incentive to work hard. They are only meant to carry out their precise job descriptions rather than earn a promotion or pay raise, as the union now negotiates pay raises en masse. However, its members found enough time to compile a union “zine,” a highly produced pamphlet which provided advice on how to navigate “difficult conversations with managers.”

    “Some people behave in the office as if the company owes them and their jobs are protected, they don’t seem to understand they work for a business,” another Condé Nast source said. “Teen Vogue was a great example of what staffers wanted to write about rather than what the magazine should have been writing about. The traffic had started to crater on Teen Vogue and it had become unsustainable as a business.”

    The magazine hasn’t been in print since 2017 (its final issue featured Hillary Clinton on the cover, the kiss of death), but its website continued to churn out content that insisted to young girls and they/thems that woke political views were each season’s must-have accessories. The attitude of its staff was one of entitlement: they seemed to see journalism as a noble calling, not a business, therefore subscriptions had nothing to do with their salaries.

    Among the union’s grievances, including that the publication is disproportionately firing “BIPOC, women or trans” employees, is that it no longer has any writers covering politics. Maybe that’s the point. Teen Vogue’s venture into Great Awokening-style politics has run well past its expiration date as the publication finds itself out of step with readers, advertisers and even some employees. Insiders say the dogmatic left-wing politics at Teen Vogue created a hostile workplace. “Internally, Teen Vogue will not be missed by a number of staffers who were tired of how inhospitable it was to staff who were not aligned politically. The way they wrote some articles about October 7 deeply upset some Jewish staffers, who questioned their ability to continue working for the brand,” says one insider.

    Teen Vogue’s anti-Israel bias was called out last year by Vogue entertainment director Sergio Kletnoy in an email to Wintour and Lynch. While Wintour has not commented on Teen Vogue’s stance, it contrasts markedly with her own actions: she immediately parted company with Vogue contributing editor-at-large Gabriella Karefa-Johnson for an anti-Israel rant the day after October 7. Other brands at Condé are struggling to turn the smallest of profits – could they be on the chopping block next? Some staffers wonder whether the decay has already gone too far to save the business. Condé Nast is reportedly on target to miss its $1 billion revenue target this year. Global advertising revenue is down, and so is web traffic. While “go woke, go broke” holds true, Condé’s search traffic has also been hit hard by AI overviews.

    Defeating the union is only part of the solution if Condé is to survive. Talking about an influx of British editors to the US, Wintour said Americans tend to think of British journalists as “cutthroat” and turn to them “when American media companies feel they need to fight to stay relevant, or profitable.”

    We will see if Wintour still has that flintiness to her. The editorial shake-ups at CBS and the Washington Post are signs the age of liberal consensus in the media is over. Tough decisions are in store for publications if they want to stay competitive. When Americans can get their news for free from podcasts and social media, traditional outlets have to offer them something they’re willing to pay for. It turns out that teen angst and student politics don’t sell – even to teenagers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • De Blasio ‘imposter’ hoodwinks British paper

    Of all the people to go as for Halloween, why would you choose Bill de Blasio, an undistinguished Mayor of New York and flame-out 2020 presidential candidate? 

    That’s a plausible explanation for the recent howler from the Times of London – Great Britain’s newspaper of record – whose veteran US correspondent Bevan Hurley quoted a man identifying himself as de Blasio on his misgivings about Zohran Mamdani.

    “While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually – rest on optimistic assumptions… about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” this total imposter told Mr. Hurley, with strange eloquence. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.” With a seasoned newsman apparently under his spell, the fake de Blasio could have plausibly put any words he wanted to into the former mayor’s mouth – like, say, an endorsement of George Wallace. How strange that he limited himself to a thoroughly centrist spiel on fiscal credibility. 

    All the same, Hurley must have thought he’d happened upon the scoop of the year: a left-populist denounces another left-populist days before an election. Hence, perhaps, the haste to get the story out, which duly appeared on the Times website at 4 p.m. ET Tuesday. 

    Mayor de Blasio was indignant. On X he declared that he was “appalled” by the story, which was “an absolute violation of journalistic ethics.” Tell Cockburn what you really think! The Mamdani campaign now seems more or less unstoppable, hence this slightly frantic attempt on de Blasio’s part to prove his loyalty to the candidate he’d endorsed.

    Hurley’s article was quickly deleted (though an archived version remains online). Cockburn notes that it’s traditionally been easy for foreign correspondents in America to bluff their way around on the strength of their accent; we may have just witnessed the first ever case of the opposite. 

  • Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Every day, Chicagoans outside the immediate areas where federal forces are deploying pick up fragments of what feels like an unfolding drama.

    Here’s a representative example: on the app NextDoor, the Chicago subreddit and in neighborhood Facebook groups, we watch cell-phone footage from Logan Square of smoke spreading through an intersection as a federal vehicle pulls away. Eventually, local outlets verify that a masked federal agent dropped canisters outside the Rico Fresh supermarket near Funston Elementary. It appears the air was filled with a chemical irritant, causing people to panic, and the vehicle departed. NBC Chicago asked Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for explanations and, as of publication, had not received a detailed public rationale. Another cluster of videos captures tense scenes outside the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb just west of Chicago. In September, a federal agent positioned above the facility fired a projectile that struck Pastor David Black in the head.

    I witnessed an arrest last Saturday afternoon – a man purchasing a hot dog was picked up by CBP. A Greek-American friend, with olive skin and a mess of dark, curly hair, claims in a groupchat that he was asked to show his passport while walking downtown – sparse on details, high on alarm. Another friend, an undocumented immigrant from Ukraine, shares with me that she’s scared of being seized. Each day, a new story and mixed context for residents who may not understand what’s actually happening. 

    The Trump administration has deployed about 500 National Guard troops in the Chicago area for an initial period of 60 days – around 300 from Illinois and 200 from Texas. Federal officials say the mission is to protect personnel and property at federal sites, especially those used by ICE. On social media, there are reports that Chicagoans are preventing federal officials from doing their job through civil disobedience, which, some conservatives say, is justification for the Trump administration to step up operations.

    Illinois and the City of Chicago have sued, arguing the orders are unlawful and implicate the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the use oIf the military in civilian law enforcement. Filed October 6, the complaint challenges both the federalization of the Illinois Guard and the importation of Texas Guard forces. A judge in Chicago is set to rule on whether to block the deployment while the case proceeds.

    Northern Command has publicly declared the troops are there to protect federal workers and property, not to perform general urban policing – though the chatter online tells a different story. There’s a general sense that Chicago is a “war zone” and that the presence of the National Guard is “overdue.” The White House itself has described the deployment as a “protection mission,” while DHS refers to the broader ICE enforcement escalation as Operation Midway Blitz.

    Reporters have yet to work out a complete, detailed after-action account explaining why gas was deployed in Logan Square at that moment. Federal officials have not produced a cohesive public explanation tying together the scattered incidents across the city. And so residents and observers have basic questions that remain unanswered: who ordered the canisters in Logan Square? What does it mean, practically, that one of our alderwomen was briefly handcuffed? Was she arrested or just threatened? Eventually there are fractions of answers, but not all emerge in time to affect public understanding.

    What many Chicagoans are experiencing is uncertainty, amplified by a lack of clear news sources. Local journalists are doing the work: verifying incidents, seeking official responses, documenting what happens on the ground. But that reporting doesn’t reach most people in its original form. Instead, it gets broken apart and redistributed through social platforms, stripped of context, arriving as fragments rather than as coherent stories. 

    From social media, people assemble different stories. Some accept the administration’s framing – that the Guard is there to keep federal workers safe in a city that allegedly refuses to do so. Others see the footage as evidence that federal power is expanding into everyday life  –  understood as authoritarian overreach. Both sides point to authentic images and cite official statements, but few can point to a single, verified timeline that links them all.

    The Guard deployment is real, active and officially limited to protecting federal personnel and property. ICE enforcement in the region has intensified under a named operation, producing repeated confrontations with residents and protesters. And the public does not yet have a stable, integrated account that links these episodes into a common operational plan. This is, in large part, a distribution problem. The pieces are authentic. The whole picture remains incomplete.