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.