Hero: Kara Swisher

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

There are few pop culture stereotypes I despise more than the one about female reporters having sex with their sources. For this reason (also paywalls), I have been less obsessed than some of my colleagues with the ongoing journalism shitshow starring Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York magazine star political reporter; her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza, another former big-deal Beltway-insider-scribe; and RFK Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, now busy destroying the public health system here and abroad.

But, like every American journalist capable of reading, I still know way, way too much about how Nuzzi, then covering the 2024 election, became embroiled in a sext and FaceTime affair with RFK Jr.—the subject of one of her profiles—while he was running for president and yes, by the way, married to actress Cheryl Hines. Meanwhile, Nuzzi was writing other pieces about Joe Biden and Donald Trump that may not have changed the course of the most important US election in my lifetime, but certainly helped to shape the narrative. Nuzzigate is to ordinary journalism scandals what the OJ Simpson case was to car chases—a story so mind-boggling and lurid that fiction can’t begin to compete. In the words of superstar tech journalist Kara Swisher, “The whole thing is just not a good look for journalists. It’s not a good look for women. It’s just it makes us look like fucking idiots.”

For which Swisher offers the pitch-perfect coda: “Make it fucking stop.”

But let us first salute the one person who emerges from this saga with her reputation intact: Swisher herself. The serial media entrepreneur—a veteran of the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal; scourge of Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, and Elon Musk—is a host of Vox’s “Pivot” podcast, among other ventures. She also used to be Nuzzi’s mentor, or so Nuzzi “writes” in what may be the worst-reviewed memoir of the past decade. But that relationship didn’t stop Swisher from taking action when she started hearing rumors about what Nuzzi and RFK Jr. had been up to.

“The minute I found out,” she told her co-host Scott Galloway on a recent “Pivot” episode, “I knew I had to tell New York magazine” (also a Vox property). Swisher said she hoped Nuzzi or Lizza would come forward on their own, “but nobody did it. And so I called. I confirmed it. I made sure it was accurate and did reporting on it.” Only after Swisher was sure of her facts did she out Nuzzi to New York editors, she added. “I said, you need to investigate, and you need to figure this out and then disclose it to our audience. And that’s all I said. I moved on.”

That’s another reason Swisher is this story’s hero: She seems to hate everything about it. The scandal broke in September 2024, but we only found out about Swisher’s role this year, as the Nuzzi-Lizza industrial complex began spewing out books, magazine articles, and Substacks detailing so many exceedingly gross violations of Journalism 101 that even my most gossip-loving friends had to take a hiatus. “I’ve been dragged back in, one, because Olivia has put me in her book, calling me her mentor and [saying] essentially, I ratted her out,” Swisher told Galloway. “But I didn’t. I did the right thing.”

When the Times came calling for comment, Swisher was gracious about Nuzzi’s talent—“Everything she said about Biden was true. Her writing was over and beyond the best political reporting out there.” She was also unyielding about what Nuzzi had done: “She just needed to come clean, and she never did,” Swisher told the Times. “It was a betrayal of the audience.”

In her “Pivot” comments, Swisher seemed even more irritated by Lizza, whose jaw-dropping Substack series—six to eight parts so far, depending on how you count, with the last couple of installments veering into Basic Instinct/Fatal Attraction territory—has been wringing the ick for maximum profit and subscribership. “I’ve told him, I think he should have written one piece if he felt he had to and moved on,” she told Galloway. Instead, Lizza disclosed her role in the scandal in a breathless cliffhanger finale to one of his posts—“like [a] really grotesque Pickwick Papers,” Swisher huffed. “And so I got dragged into the ridiculous drama. Thank you. That’s it.”

And now, having said her piece, Swisher is done. “I hate being a side character in this,” she told Galloway. “I just did the right thing, and I’d like to leave, please.” A sentiment, no doubt, many of us who are mere spectators heartily applaud. But first, please accept my heartfelt thanks for reminding the world how a bad-ass female journalist at the pinnacle of her profession actually behaves: not just with clear-eyed determination when the situation calls for it, but with a mature understanding of the lasting consequences for everyone involved (well, maybe not RFK Jr.). Too bad Nuzzi wasn’t paying closer attention.