Yikes!
"Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘Canto’ Sells Just 1,200 Print Copies In First Week"
Mary Whitfill Roeloffs for @forbes.com— Zach Everson (@zacheverson.com) December 11, 2025 at 10:14 AM
For the record (it’s usually abbreviated), the full quote was an attack on the male proprietor of a media empire: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” From within my very limited (BlueSky) social media bubble, it’s been interesting to watch the reactions swing between, as Garry Trudea once put it, media people ‘sniffing each others’ lanyards’ and the dismissive ‘two Italians yelling at each other in public’.
Scott Lemiuex, at LGM, on “A major Beltway scandal”:
While I’m very happy to see that Simon and Schuster take a massive bath on Olivia Nuzzi’s hilariously reviewed cross between Shattered Glass and Rite Aid brand Joan Didion, I continue to respectfully disagree with my colleague on the question of whether the scandal Nuzzi apparently barely mentions in her book is worthy of attention going forward. This is almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism. Judy Miller was bad, but she was merely the most prominent example of reporters uncritically passing along administration propaganda, which was more the rule than the exception in the lead up to the Iraq War. Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair also committed career-ending offenses, but the stories they manufactured were in themselves trivial and had no impact on American politics. What Nuzzi did was much worse, implicates a lot of people and was not in fact even career ending!
Lizza’s latest is free, which is good because it makes the magnitude of the scandal clear…
It’s remarkable that Nuzzi (according to multiple reviewers) seems to think even now that her having an affair with a subject she was covering and whose political goals she was working to advance without disclosure in subsequent profiles and who she was running ratfucking operations on behalf of represents merely “private” misconduct, like she had an affair with some random person she met on a dating app. It’s even more remarkable that she thought it was plausible that it would remain private. And her belief that Kennedy would just fade away would be the most remarkable and damning thing if she probably wasn’t lying about that…
It’s true as far as it goes that it’s unfair that Nuzzi has (belatedly and after a fawning NYT profile literally written by Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s son and a windfall profit for a book with no audience she literally dictated into an iPhone) suffered consequences and Kennedy has not, but this makes the behavior of Nuzzi and her enablers even more damning! There is not in fact any viable way of getting rid of a cabinet secretary who has the support of the president once they’ve been confirmed, which makes doing anything possible to stop it from happening ex ante all the more important…
There needs to be much more intense and clear-eyed scrutiny of RFK Jr’s HHS tenure, but how he got into that position in the first place is also an important story, and it was one the Beltway media just wanted to go away for obvious reasons. Nuzzi wasn’t some random person with a substack — she was a huge star in that world, not least because while the reasons for her nihilist embrace of Trumpism were unusual the embrace itself was not.
Dave Carp has a lengthy fisking on BlueSky, which is probably more fun than reading the book. Extracts: