The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan

Anyone who is not a moralist or kidding themselves will admit that a good piece of gossip is one of life's greatest pleasures. Gossip exposes the false sanctimony of the powerful: it reveals the smug and self-righteous to be grubby, selfish and embarrassing - just like the rest of us. If the pronouncements of politicians make history, and the reporting of the media shapes that history's official narrative, gossip runs along behind them, like a bratty younger sibling, filling in their omissions to tell a truer story. "You left out this part." "That's not what you told me."

Maybe this is why media gossip about journalists and politicians carries such a frisson of transgressive delight: it breaks their monopoly on narrative authority. The people who have been appointed to tell us stories about our world, and about ourselves, finally get themselves subjected to the same treatment. It helps, too, to bust the bubble of a media industry that has long demanded more moral gravitas than it has really earned. These are the people, after all, who claim to be holding power to account. But how do they actually behave towards those in power?

And so it was maybe predictable that so many people would feel a gleeful jolt of schadenfreude last week, when New York Magazine revealed that it had suspended Olivia Nuzzi, a young star reporter known for her biting wit and deep bench of Republican sources. The cause? Nuzzi had allegedly admitted to sexting with one of her reporting subjects: the anti-vax crusader, animal corpse desecrator, former presidential candidate and brain worm host Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Love is blind, and it could be that Nuzzi simply has unconventional taste. But the incident has taken on heavy symbolic proportions, becoming a litmus test within media circles for various opinions on journalistic ethics, how to earn and keep readers' trust, and the journalists' vexed obligations to the truth in an industry where models of "access journalism" routinely incentivize them to have close - even cozy - relationships with those they cover.

Nuzzi, in particular, has a talent for getting incendiary and controversial figures on the right to say things that they probably shouldn't, and media watchers have long speculated that this might be because of her own conservative leanings: that she is able to ingratiate herself to rightwing subjects because she is able to convince them that she offers a sympathetic ear. In that much, at least, any honest journalist will have to admit that Nuzzi is not alone. But she seems to have taken her sympathy for her subjects far beyond the industry baseline.

Not everyone finds Nuzzi's conduct objectionable on journalistic grounds. Ben Smith, the former New York Times media columnist who now runs the outlet Semafor, used his newsletter to ask what all the fuss was about. He claimed that British journalists had texted him to the effect of: "If you're not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?"

The NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik characterizes this statement from Smith as "bananas". We might also add that it is insulting to Smith's colleagues, be they American, British or anything else - and in particular, to the women. It implies that there are large numbers of female journalists trading sex for access. There are not. It is rare, and more than frowned upon, for journalists to sleep with their sources or subjects: doing so compromises the integrity of the work. And most female journalists, like most female professionals in any field, are not interested in trading on their sexuality for professional advancement.