Three media outlets made news of their own over the last week, and it wasn’t for doing good journalism. No, apparently, three of the elites in the news slinging biz made it quite clear that things like ethics and standards are dumb and for the little people: Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and CBS News.
While I wrote last week about this general belief among America’s Amazing Elites that things like ethics and writing coherent emails are not required to be fabulously successful and wealthy in America. But this will focus more on where I live.
I graduated with a journalism and communications degree. This seems to be a rarity in the upper echelons of our media elite. A journalism graduate is not at the helm of any of the aforementioned outlets: Radhika Jones, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, has a PhD in English, Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, has a history degree, and Joe Kahn, the editor-in-chief of The New York Times, also has a degree in history.
A misunderstanding of what makes a good story, a belief in how to write that’s not great, etc. are all symptoms of people without solid training in journalism, and believe me, it shows. But NOTHING is as excusable as not having standards and ethics, which is what seems to be happening in the media industry.
This leads me to Weiss, who was one of the sleaziest examples of the cancel culture grift when she claimed to have been canceled when she left the Times opinion page. Not fired, mind you, but left on her own accord to start her own media outlet, which made her millions. Now, the very canceled Weiss runs CBS News, and she’s been off to a rocky start. Along with some questionable editing of the Donald Trump 60 Minutes interview recently, Bari expressed dismay at CBS News Standards and Practices unit, leading some at CBS News to express concern that she would disband the unit. She even reportedly said something that is almost comically outrageous for a top editor to ask: “What is the point of standards?”
Now, in her defense, this is more or less the slogan of her career. But I cannot imagine someone who had the real training that one gets during a path to a journalism degree saying such a thing, unless they were a bad student. Standards and ethics are a big part of the education one gets at our journalism schools.
The other big news outlet led by a history major, The New York Times, made some waves last week by running a classic “horny profile” about No-Regrets Adultery Bait Olivia Nuzzi. You might recall last October a big story broke that Nuzzi, then an overly celebrated New York magazine writer, had an affair with Frog-like Human Robert Kennedy Jr. She had been writing about Kennedy, covering The Worst Kennedy’s ill-fated 2024 presidential campaign.
This, my friends, is wildly unethical for a journalist. Trust me, getting caught schlepping someone you are writing about should be the end of your journalism career. Not for Olivia! She landed on her feet, snaring a gig as “West Coast editor” for Vanity Fair a mere months after she was caught.
The profile that was in the Times last week was almost comical. The entire thing, which includes some multimedia video flourishes of Nuzzi driving with her shades on, is like a bad parody of a Lana Del Ray song. What this ends up being is a deep reflection on just how broken our elite media institutions have become.
The only thing that's interesting about Nuzzi is the story of how an amoral careerist with no interest in policy and abysmal ethics became an acclaimed national political reporter. But rather than tell that story, the entire media seems desperate to play a part in it.
— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) 2025-11-15T01:36:35.276Z
As if giving someone with the ethics of a scorpion a glowing profile is not enough, her new employer gave her space to hawk her new book, a bizarre memoir of her affair with the Worst Kennedy, strange observations on life, and a kind of offensive account of the tragic Los Angeles wildfires of last year. It’s offensive because she compares the fires to her “ordeal” of being caught in a sex scandal. Also, she does the usual “I was canceled” thing despite not being cancelled at all.
“she flamed out and faded away” is such funny framing for a woman publishing an excerpt of her book in vanity fair, where she also works. I wish I could flame out and fade away so successfully
I am just going to say this now: her writing is like a parody of bad prose. Not to pick on Lana again, but it’s like someone trying to write who really can’t after hearing a bunch of Lana Del Ray songs. That is, if Del Ray sang about a lover who has brain worms.
bro there's a whole paragraph about his brain worm lmfao
I guess by now, you might want to ask if any of this matters, and I think it does. To have a free, effective press, we can’t have a media industry that pays little mind to ethics and norms. It can’t be an industry that enables its elite to operate as if only they are above it all. It affects their journalism decisions and affects what they push as far as stories. Plus, as a general societal thing, shouldn’t our elite institutions give a shit about ethics and standards? The result of a society that doesn’t is currently occupying the Oval Office, and I think we all see how that’s going.
The last word goes to, who else, Lana Del Ray.
