{"id":4323,"date":"2025-11-21T02:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4323"},"modified":"2025-11-20T21:59:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T05:59:16","slug":"journalism-and-brands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/11\/21\/journalism-and-brands\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism and “Brands”"},"content":{"rendered":"

As someone who was all but born on a copy desk \u2013 my mother always said she wasn\u2019t the first woman copy editor on the Houston Chronicle<\/i>, but she was the first pregnant one \u2013 I grew up with the myths, the realities, and the ethics of journalism at the core of my being.<\/p>\n

I may have picked up much of the same sort of beliefs about the legal profession in law school, but to be completely honest, I\u2019ve always believed in journalism more than I believed in the law. I do know a lot of lawyers who really believe in the law and right now some of the finest of those are using it to fight the abusive regime that\u2019s trying to destroy our democracy.<\/p>\n

There are some journalists who believe in true journalism doing that as well.<\/p>\n

But then there are the others.<\/p>\n

I had never heard of Olivia Nuzzi until the scandal broke about her relationship with the Kennedy scion who is now dismantling our health resources, a relationship that went on while she was supposedly reporting on his presidential campaign. (I\u2019m using the word \u201crelationship\u201d because I don\u2019t know the details and really don\u2019t want to find out what they are, but what went on between them was not a simple matter of reporter and subject of interest.)<\/p>\n

She was \u201ccancelled\u201d \u2013 lost her job, was criticized heavily in many corners \u2013 but now she\u2019s back. It\u2019s been about a year. She\u2019s written a book and The New York Times<\/i> did an elaborate feature piece on her. Apparently she also has a new job at Vanity Fair<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I have not read her book. As far as I know, I\u2019ve never read anything she\u2019s written and from what I\u2019ve read about her I can\u2019t think of any reason why I would. I have, however, read a few pieces about her, which caused me to reflect\u00a0 on what journalism is and should be.<\/p>\n

In the piece that brought her to my attention, Colby Hall (who I also never heard of before) compared her to Hunter S. Thompson<\/a>. He was talking about the kind of political coverage Nuzzi did and he meant it as a huge compliment, an assessment that she broke the rules in the same effective way that Thompson did back in the day.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible she is equally outrageous. Maybe she\u2019s an asshole in a manner similar to Thompson. (I read Thompson religiously during the Nixon and Reagan years, but while I loved his savage reporting, I never wanted to meet him.)<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing that makes me question that comparison \u2013 and question the judgment of anyone who would make it \u2013 Thompson never had anything approaching a friendly relationship with the political people he covered. In fact, he mostly hated them and made no bones about it.<\/p>\n

Hunter S. Thompson did not do access journalism. At all. He was the anti-access journalist. <\/p>\n

As near as I can tell, Nuzzi is an access journalist. Hall\u2019s article says that\u2019s how she got her prior job. Unfortunately, access journalism is not uncommon these days, which is one of the reasons that many of the terrible things being done by the regime destroying our government are not getting well covered.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing about access journalists: they\u2019re very likely to run into situations where they have to keep their mouth shut about what they know if they want to keep their access. And they might have to give their supposed subjects advance notice of other kinds of problems. Or advise them on their media relations.<\/p>\n

There are those claiming that Kennedy might not be HHS Secretary but for what Nuzzi wrote before people knew about their relationship.<\/p>\n

Having been raised by real newspaper people, I have nothing but contempt for access journalists. When I lived in Washington, DC, I was shocked to find out how many reporters and sources hobnobbed together.<\/p>\n

Neither of my parents would have ever gone along with access journalism. They cultivated sources, sure, but they didn\u2019t keep quiet about powerful people who were doing terrible things.<\/p>\n

Of course, they never got rich, and they ended up quitting jobs on principle from time to time.<\/p>\n

But Hall did make a point in his piece that might be a greater problem than access journalism. He said that Nuzzi\u2019s comeback \u2013 which sounds tone deaf and narcissistic to people like me \u2013 is the way the system works now. She has a brand and this all fits into it.<\/p>\n

It may not be institutionally respectable \u2013 it won\u2019t give her a shot at a prestige job \u2013 but the institutions are dying. Building a brand is how you build a career now. If you just do a good job and try to report on things that matter, you’ll end up like the Teen Vogue<\/em> crew: in the unemployment line.<\/p>\n

Nuzzi\u2019s not a reporter, if she ever was. She\u2019s a celebrity.<\/p>\n

It pays a lot better and you don\u2019t have to worry about pesky things like ethics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone who was all but born on a copy desk \u2013 my mother always said she wasn\u2019t the first woman copy editor on the Houston Chronicle, but she was the first pregnant one \u2013 I grew up with the myths, the realities, and the ethics of journalism at the core of my being. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1148,1043,103],"class_list":["post-4323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-access-journalism","tag-ethics","tag-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4324,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4323\/revisions\/4324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}