"Literally nothing on this earth takes itself as seriously as American journalism. There are rogue-state dictators it's more permissible to laugh at than the endlessly hilarious pretensions of newsmen and newswomen in the United States. The crucial difference between the British press and US press is that at least we in the British press know we're in the gutter. The Americans have always imagined and so loudly that they are involved in some kind of higher calling."
"We are, by the way, talking about the tale of Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza and Robert F Kennedy. If you've missed this one, you have a great treat in store. Olivia and Ryan were hotshot political journalists (and a couple) covering presidential campaigns and writing a joint book about the 2020 one, when Ryan discovered last year that Olivia had had what is primly described as a digital affair with wingnut presidential candidate RFK."
"It all blew up, there was some legal hokey-cokey, they lost their jobs, she fled to LA, RFK became health secretary. He's got bigger brainworms to fry; the other two are now breaking their silence. And everything everything about it is darkly hysterical. It should obviously be being written as comedy. Instead, the story is being chronicled with maximum portentousness by its own protagonists."
American journalism exhibits extreme self-importance and solemnity, treating its own foibles as high-minded enterprise. The British press acknowledges being in the gutter, while the American press projects a lofty calling. A recent scandal involving Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza and Robert F. Kennedy illustrates the phenomenon: two political journalists lost jobs after revelations of a digital affair with RFK, followed by legal entanglements and public fallout. The episode is inherently absurd and darkly hysterical, yet the principal actors frame and chronicle it with inflated seriousness, producing melodrama where a comic treatment would be more fitting.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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