I'M OLD AND DON'T follow every flash in the pan of crap that is American journalism so I was only vaguely aware of Olivia Nuzzi before now, I'd known about her scribblage about RFK jr. even before their epically gross and vulgar sexting became public in the early phases when her jilted fiance started spilling the beans on her. I didn't have a real idea of how she's weaponized being a skank to get ahead in the journalism racket until I heard Keith Olbermann talking about his history with her (she was a legal adult when they started living together so what they were doing is officially none of my business). But it wasn't until reading this article in The New Republic that I had a real appreciation for how sleazy and slimy she AND THE MEN WHO WERE INVOLVED WITH HER have been. It is one of those rare pieces of journalism about someone in the racket which admits that what they do can lead to catastrophe in real life.
It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr. espouses kill people. These beliefs have already killed people. As secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, he now holds the well-being of millions of Americans in his hands. And Olivia Nuzzi is joking about it in The New York Times.
“All I think about is how this woman was part of mainstreaming this guy,” Aparna Nair, professor at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, told me. RFK Jr. “will do profound damage on a global scale—that’s all that matters,” she said. The global health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the first to be cut under RFK Jr.’s tenure, and outbreaks of illnesses like Ebola, Marburg, and mpox are now expanding across countries and borders.
As the public fixated on fresh Nuzzi scandals last week, RFK Jr. was instructing the CDC to add language on its website about the possibility of vaccines leading to autism. It’s the latest in his expanding focus on autistic individuals; he has also overseen the creation of a national autism research registry and blamed parents for taking Tylenol during pregnancy.
“In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute, said of Nuzzi. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”
Yes, she did and she did it knowing full well how dangerous it would be for him to have any role in public policy - as bad as he is in charge of HHS imagine an RFK jr. presidency.
I want to in no way diminish the moral atrocity of Olivia Nuzzi and what she did but it's necessary to point out that she was hardly the only one in the journalism racket who is responsible for all of the above LITERALLY THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THOSE WITH A WIDELY RECOGNIZABLE NAME IN THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM RACKET HAD AS MUCH AND MANY HAD MORE OF A HAND IN THIS. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and many others at CNN, those at every one of the other networks, cable, TV, radio, the goddamned New York Times, the WaPo the LA Times and many of the surviving ink on paper entities. Virtually the entire American media of any size and influence had a hand in the sandbagging of Joe Biden which led directly to Trump II and with full and absolute knowledge of who he was, what he intended, the Heritage goons of Project 2025 who had laid out the plan for his destruction of democracy and the country.
It isn't something you'll get from Ken Burns or any "public intellectual" but one of the greatest and most horrifying lessons that should but almost certainly won't be learned from the decade of Trump is that the free press, those whose free speech is magnified the most by money and technology and, so, influence, is not anything like an asset of democracy, certainly not of egalitarian democracy. It has served as a total and willing part of the fascists' attempt to destroy democracy.
The real history of the American "free press" isn't honestly told in the fable of Elijiah Lovejoy or Peter Zenger it's more honestly told in terms that we are being force fed in the bio of Olivia Nuzzi, THAT, PERHAPS USUALLY MINUS THE SEX, IS THE REAL CHARACTER OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM.
As I must always point out this has been made ever worse by the Supreme Court starting with the Warren Courts carte blanche issued to the media to lie about politicians and other public figures with impunity. Though I've come to think that there is no more obtusity encouraging a professional training than one in the law - that pose of obtusity directly related to the ubiquitous professional practice of lying with impunity by lawyers - there has never been a stupider ruling than the one that ended up profiting the wealthy oligarchs who owned and ran the media and the oligarchs who could buy media companies and lie to their own profit. I don't believe for a second that any of the Warren Court members who issued that ruling were not fully competent enough to understand that would be the result of it, though they pretended that wasn't a fully and confidently predictable consequence of that "free speech" ruling, and ever more so the Buckley v Valeo ruling that was the first to call the corruption of money in our elections "free speech." If I slam the scribblers and babblers AND PUBLISHERS of the free press, I slam the lying-lawyers even more so.
Only a press that tells the truth is an asset and necessary part of egalitarian democracy. One that lies will destroy it.
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