It’s not a good time for the media. And not just because the profession is dying and two years from now will be replaced by AI generated slop sourced through a review of trending topics on Bluesky, but because in the last week or so…
The Epstein files revealed that Michael Wolff, the smear merchant popular with lefties for going after Trump, had close ties to Jeffrey Epstein and was coaching him, seemingly writing about him and not writing about him…
And Olivia Nuzzi, who was sidelined over an affair with RFK Jr, wrote about it in something called American Canto, that reads like this…
You cannot outrun your life on fire.
I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.
Apart from the obvious, that anyone who cared about her, her agent and publisher, should have told her to burn this rather than even dream of publishing it as a book, Wolff and Nuzzi crossed a bunch of lines, but it’s the kind of lines that political journalists dance on the edge of all the time.
Why is the White House still battling leaks? Why was the Russiagate scandal one long series of crossed wires between the media and the government? Much of industrial political journalism is about moving someone else’s narratives.
Now and then I get contacted by sources. They want to talk on Signal. They have agendas and scores to settle. I usually do the call but I rarely do anything with it. That’s probably dumb because the way you get ahead in that line of work is to let someone else use you, become their mouthpiece and pursue their agenda, and in exchange you get inside info.
Wolff and Nuzzi is where it ends up. Mostly not there. Journalists sell out step by step, but they do it without crashing and burning, but mostly they become boring. You look at their stories and you know they’re running someone else’s material. And then you see variations of that same ‘exclusive’ pop up and a few thousand bots promoting it. In the same exact words.
And if you don’t spend too much time hanging around with the people deep in the game, you can usually come out of it with your sanity and your soul, but not your credibility. Mostly you stop doing what matters and you end up doing what the people you’re supposed to be reporting on decided matters. That’s political journalism.
