Quick, sharp look at how a press corps that protected powerful predators now gaslights the public while rehabilitating a journalist who slept with the people she covered.
The week brought two connected stories about how media elites behave when their own are exposed. One thread concerns renewed focus on Jeffrey Epstein and how outlets handled that scandal, and the other centers on Olivia Nuzzi’s revived career amid revelations about affairs with subjects she covered. Both stories point to a media culture that shields insiders and punishes outsiders.
Olivia Nuzzi has managed to land back in political journalism at Vanity Fair, even publishing a memoir excerpt titled “American Canto”. That restart came as the press mostly shrugged while readers learned she was involved with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the period she was supposed to be covering him.
What the mainstream reports left out for a while is that Nuzzi was engaged to Ryan Lizza while she was seeing RFK Jr., and Lizza has begun telling his side of the story on his own platform. When two journalists start trading private grievances in public, the whole affair stops being personal and starts looking like a mutual attempt to rebuild brands.
Lizza’s revelations pushed the episode further, alleging Nuzzi also had affairs with public figures she reported on, including Keith Olbermann and Mark Sanford. The Sanford detail is striking because it echoes his own past scandal where he vanished and blamed a hiking trip while hiding personal indiscretions.
That history matters because it highlights a pattern: reporters cozy with their subjects create conflicts of interest that distort coverage. Internet observers noted Nuzzi covered Mike Pence closely, but Pence’s well-known rule of not meeting alone with single women likely kept him out of this mess.
The broader point isn’t just one woman’s choices. It’s that elite outlets have welcomed Nuzzi back and many in the press are framing her primarily as a victim. Meanwhile, Lizza is monetizing his humiliation and both are being propped up as media figures despite obvious ethical problems.
This is the same ecosystem that helped protect men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Many stories about them were buried or softened for years because powerful outlets and journalists looked the other way. It took someone like “Julie K. Brown, breaking this story at the Miami Herald” to finally force Epstein’s empire into the light.
Weinstein’s fall came only after decades of cover-ups and jokes in the right rooms of Hollywood and the press. The #MeToo era revealed a lot, but it didn’t cure the instinct of media elites to circle the wagons for their own kind and to punish those who threaten the club.
So we end up with a press that excoriates a remark from the president — a one-off insult where he called a female reporter “Piggy” — while simultaneously protecting a reporter who repeatedly put herself in compromising positions with people she covered. That double standard looks like rank hypocrisy.
I’ll grant that the president’s insults are wrong and unnecessary, but they are, at root, personal ugliness, not institutional corruption. What’s harder to stomach is how much the media protects insiders who use access and influence to avoid accountability.
On balance, stories about Nuzzi, Lizza, Sanford, Weinstein, and Epstein fit together as a portrait of a media class that shields itself. When outlets blackball real reporting and preserve favored figures, the public loses faith in institutions that should be watchdogs, not bodyguards.
We should expect better from people who claim to stand for transparency. Instead, we get reputation management, selective outrage, and a press corps that teaches readers which scandals get full airing and which ones get buried. That pattern is the real story the elite press would rather ignore.
