A prominent journalist is getting raked over the coals online for coming to the defense of New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, who was placed on leave over an inappropriate relationship with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online publication Semafor, appeared to downplay the severity of the Nuzzi-Kennedy affair on Monday.
Smith also revealed that Semafor received an anonymous tip about the affair before the news site was scooped by ex-CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, who dropped the bombshell on his independent newsletter.
Nuzzi, the 31-year-old political correspondent who was engaged to now-former fiance Ryan Lizza before the scandal exploded, was placed on leave by the magazine over the weekend after it was learned she exchanged personal messages with the 70-year-old Kennedy, who is married to actor Cheryl Hines.
The relationship was never physical, according to Nuzzi, whom Kennedy has accused of being obsessed with him to the point of circumventing a cell phone blockage in order to send him nude photographs. The Post has sought comment from Nuzzi.
Writing in Semafor, Smith offered a “slightly contrarian view” by noting that “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,” Smith wrote.
“That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.”
Smith made a comparison to the United Kingdom, where “if you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?”
He then shared a text message that he received from an advice writer who observed that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”
Smith noted that Nuzzi’s critics “were furious at her” over a July 4 story which appeared in New York magazine detailing the extent to which President Biden’s inner circle concealed the fact that he was too old to serve a second term in office.
Biden supporters’ furor over the Nuzzi article led Bloomberg News to cancel a planned public relations campaign promoting her show for the outlet.
“The obvious defense of that story is that it was true, something few Democrats now contest (though the few that do continue to loudly fill up our email inboxes and Twitter mentions),” Smith wrote.
But he added that reporters were “also in the business of trust, as well as truth.”
“And for those purposes, the appearance of conflict is, in fact, bad enough.”
On X, Smith was criticized for appearing to downplay Nuzzi’s ethical violation.
“I’m sorry to be a humorless scold, but I do not think this is correct or a good idea to be putting out in the world,” journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote on his X feed of Smith’s reference to British journalists sleeping with their sources.
Smith replied to Yglesias: “This is my caricature of a UK view, to be clear — and many of my British friends are also annoying about it!”
Another X user wrote: “LOL of course Ben Smith is defending Nuzzi. He has the audacity to describe his predictable wagon-circling as ‘risking his neck on a slightly contrarian view’.”
Jeremy Fassler, a journalist whose byline has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Mother Jones and The Atlantic, wrote: “We are on day four of Nuzzigate and I am still seeing respected, powerful journalists offer excuses for her behavior that amount to ‘who hasn’t had an inappropriate relationship with a source?’”
The Post has sought comment from Smith.