We need to talk more about how white privilege functions in our workplace.
My take on these folks is this: they never would’ve climbed to such high-access, high-profile spots in media without their peers constantly aiding them and overlooking their serious flaws.
There are years of documented instances where they’ve overstepped boundaries and made colleagues or sources feel deeply uncomfortable.
The fact that they can still land big book deals, short-term magazine contracts, or live off their reputations and independent platforms shows just how broken our media ecosystem is—and yeah, it often favors white mediocrity.
I hate to say it, but if they were Black or Brown, they’d likely have been fully canceled and blackballed by now.
As much as the tabloids love mocking Olivia, she ought to be grateful that people still find her relevant enough to discuss, rather than ignoring her into total obscurity and banishment.
Isn't Bari Weiss the greatest example of mediocrity skyrocketing to the top?
I saw someone tweet that Bari Weiss is lucky that the Dunning-Kruger effect already has a name.
She has carved out a niche because she an anti-woke Lesbian who is seriously pro-Israel.
The right can parade her around as having a bigger tent, all the while she will claim she’s not part of that tent and she is just tackling legacy media.
The last part is her pedestal now, but the former is the subtext
A lot of former let-me-explain-it-real-slow 20somethings from the Juice Vox Mafia might thumb-wrestle you for that accolade.
She legitimately built a media company pretty impressively. There's a legitimate case that she could modernize a television news station. That isn't actually why she got the job of course, and isn't what she's doing, but Weiss built something unlike the others who just keep getting money and employment for no real reason.
I'm not sure legitimately is the right word.
I can think the free press is trash and still appreciate what she was able to accomplish. Building a successful media company isn't an easy thing to do. The number of people that have built successful new media companies is limited, especially when you limit your search to the right wing ones. CBS has been an outdated business model and finding someone that can modernize it doesn't provide a ton of options with experience doing so. I do not think Weiss is the best, and there was a clear secondary motivation to inject right wing bias into their company to please the dictator, but Weiss does legitimately have success in a modern media environment when CBS is losing influence.
I see what you’re saying, but The Free Press isn’t doing good quality reporting. It’s largely opinion and has gotten things terribly wrong on several occasions in its reporting. It’s a lot easier to build a successful business that pushes an agenda that angers people and doesn’t need to conform to the highest journalistic standards and ethics than it is to build a modern but ethical news outlet
I don't disagree with this. It still requires skill to be successful or there would be more people with successful media companies.
Again, I'm not sure I would call it successful, but I think we'd just be arguing semantics here.
She managed to get the company worth 100s of millions in a short amount of time. If that's not success, I don't know what is.
You definitely have a point. One last thing I’ll say on this though is it helps that she was at The New York Times before it. I really doubt it would be as well known (and therefore mildly successful) if she didn’t already have a platform with a lot of eyes on it and the personality/willingness to orchestrate a dramatic resignation from it. I think Weiss manipulated her experience at The NYT to fit a political narrative many Americans identify with, then continued to cater to those view points at the expense of ethical reporting. So, it’s not really that she made a successful business from scratch. She made herself a celebrity of sorts and by association, her company is doing okay in a market that’s hard to break into
Imho “legitimate” is not an appropriate descriptor considering her investors were Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks. They have an agenda to push, and she was always going to help them push it.
I'm not commenting on the quality of the free press, but get ability to grow it. We have our own investors (the chorus thing happened recently). I don't think the free press is good and she was chosen over a select few other new media people because of her bias, but she's not profiting off her name but because she was successful with what she did. I'm not saying the Free Press is good, I'm saying it was successful, something CBS is not.
I mean, to be fair, he runs a Substack now whose engagement (and membership, I assume) is tanking the longer he draws out his personal vendetta story time. And Vanity Fair is letting her contract expire in a week. So there’s that.
I read the first, free installment, and have read excerpts from the later ones that have been posted. They're enjoyable.
In Olivia Nuzzi’s case, it’s more than white privilege - it’s blond, thin, attractive privilege. My husband just yesterday compared her to Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos - white older men just lose it around an attractive blond woman. Not sure if she would have had skyrocketing success if she had been white, brunette, average looking and overweight.
I just want to be clear where the “blame” (if that’s the right word?) lies here with regard to this particular phenomenon. A person’s physical attributes are what they are (I mean, yes, you can dye your hair blond, etc., but you know what I’m saying). The fact that men can’t judge a women’s contributions rationally without taking into account the shape of their bodies and their “sex appeal” is a tale as old as time. I’m not a Nuzzi fan at this point, but should she be dissed because fucking stupid men can’t be in the room with her without getting a fucking hard on? That’s on them.
I think the relationship between men who abuse their positions of power and the women who knowingly participate in those affairs is exactly what creates these over-privileged media figures—who stop acting like true public servants (which is how I view reporters who genuinely care) and instead chase fame, access, influence, and millions of dollars.
Absolutely it’s on the men. 100%. And they are idiots to lose their minds when faced with a beautiful woman.
But some women do take advantage of their, um, attributes. I don’t know enough about Olivia Nuzzi to say definitively that she did this, but I read enough about Elizabeth Holmes to believe she used her attractiveness to her benefit. I have no idea how talented a writer and reporter Nuzzi is, or how hard she worked, because I don’t think I’ve read her stuff, but I was a journalist long enough to say it’s highly unusual for anyone, even someone very talented, to have the type of success she had starting in college.
Nuzzi cultivates it. She styles herself as a modern-day temptress. At 16 she wrote a a song called "Jailbait" and had herself photographed in a see-through lace top and black bra. She has a history of contacting much older, powerful men who can help her. She has been inappropriate with two male sources that we know of.
Attractive women journalists get hit on and even men in the newsroom can be pigs -- the men at the papers I worked for ranked their women colleagues by attractiveness -- but they don't act like Nuzzi.
Thank you for your valuable clarification.
It seems to me more probable that this isn’t a function of skin color, but rather of class. A lot of mediocre folks who went to the right schools and whose parents had the right connections end up on high perches. People with genuine talent, even white people with genuine talent, who didn’t source from that background, find the barriers to entry to be vexingly high.
Color is certainly part of it. A Black woman definitely would not be allowed to keep failing upward. But it's not enough just to be white either. Nuzzi exploits her sexuality.
Interestingly enough, Nuzzi’s parents weren’t rich. Her dad was a sanitation worker.
True enough. But Nuzzi went to Fordham.
I'm more familiar these days with literary publishing. When I see the heralds tiding the good news of a debut novel for a person under 30, my first thought is, "Another Iowa MFA?"
fordham isn’t really a top school by any means
For Nuzzi we know why
Failing upwards has been a media thing for years. Aside from Judith Miller, who of course landed on Fox News, none of the people who got Iraq horribly wrong suffered as a result. Most of them have just faded as what they had to offer became available via the firehose of social media.
Lots of bad journalists have failed up, and many have been white, like Keith Olbermann, Chris Cuomo, Megyn Kelly, Lara Logan and Bari Weiss. There are white journalists who haven't been rehabilitated, sure, but I struggle to think of a Black journalist given a second chance like that. There's a reason Don Lemon is on Instagram or whatever and not back on TV.
I think you summed it up perfectly
Honestly I feel like it's because for a long time it was important to have voices from all sides and largely most of the media tried to be a fair arbiter of information.
Unfortunately that concept has left the building for a good chunk of them and making money becomes the more important pov.
The thing of it is when something like this changes it takes a while for reasonable people to notice and try to do something about it. It's similar to why dictatorships are able to rise up and everyone gets shocked. Humans have a hard time paying attention to change.
It was always obvious. There are just massive blind spots in environments that insular and incestuous. I worked at NYMag and pitched them early stories that they would finally come to their senses on two years later. Few people in that building knew of absolutely anything beyond their social bubble.
Thank you for your service.
I’ve not followed Lizza’s diatribes on Nuzzi although I read snippets about the first installment. I thought he was a pretty respected reporter and journalist, though.
He was. You don’t get to be a staff writer at the New Yorker without some chops.
I should’ve said “is,” not was.
I don’t think his reputation has tanked, but maybe I’m missing something.
It’s entirely unfair and yes, a symptom of white privilege. With Nuzzi having additional “pretty privilege” on top. There are plenty of women in journalism who struggle to be taken seriously because of their looks, then you have someone like Nuzzi who uses her looks for access. She tears every other woman journalist down, but it’s obvious to me she has a thing for being close to men in power, so she doesn’t care.
I dunno, man…it’s almost like rich white people from a background of extreme privilege all stick together to make sure no poors sneak up the socioeconomic ladder…it’s by design that these douchenozzles are at the top.
Poor kid here who graduated from j school with debt. I couldn’t afford to work for free or pennies at internships, had to work full time through school, I was exhausted. No connections through my parents, sooo, waitressing during the housing bubble and going back to school got marketing as a career instead.
Sold my soul to pay bills. Rich kids don’t have to worry about that, no soul to begin with, but daddy made sure they could take 5 internships with his friends company while he paid the bills…
So, journalism is and has been mostly for elites children to run around the world and play savior to the masses while thoroughly obeying their overlords (who happen to be friends with daddy).
It’s a big club, and you’re not in it.
They’re a name, notorious or not they’re known which might lead to readers and that’s all that matters to many outlets.
Why is casual racism so popular in r/"journalism"