Sep 9, 2024
Olivia Nuzzi Describes Backlash For Telling TRUTH About Biden's Condition
New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi joins TYT to talk about the backlash she faced for covering President Joe Biden's deteriorating condition.
- 21 minutes
I was shocked by the things
that I was learning from them, just
the things that for them were just totally
normal parts of covering the president.
But to me, it just seemed like a scandal.
Right?
Where the radio pooler, from a from a
network whose job is to get audio and give
[00:00:16]
it out to the rest of the radio stations,
told me that often there's just
not usable audio because the president
doesn't speak very clearly.
It's rough out there for journalists,
especially when small mobs of people can
easily get you fired or demoted over their
grievances in how stories are reported,
[00:00:36]
or whether an inconvenient truth
is shared with the public.
And that's certainly something
that happened to journalist Olivia Nuzzi.
Now, back in July, Nuzi was announced to
lead a six episode interview series titled
Working Capital on Bloomberg TV's network,
[00:00:52]
and according to variety,
it focuses on candid exchanges
with political and business leaders.
There was supposed to be this big PR
campaign around it in order to promote it,
to ensure that it does well.
But after a group of Democrats complained
[00:01:09]
to Bloomberg about Nazis reporting
on Biden, it appears that they might have
scrapped that PR campaign altogether.
Now, what are they upset about?
A piece that she wrote for Intelligencer,
New York magazine, The Conspiracy
of Silence, to protect Joe Biden.
[00:01:25]
The president's mental decline was
like a dark family secret for many elite
supporters, and this same group of people
also dug into her tweets from many,
many years ago,
where she's obviously joking to paint her
as some sort of racist, which she is not.
[00:01:42]
Now, joining us to speak
about this whole incident
is the journalist herself, Olivia Nuzzi.
Olivia, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
So give us the details about what ended
up happening with this PR campaign.
[00:01:58]
- Did they really scrap it?
- Yeah.
I mean, basically, you know,
I published this story on July 4th.
I always love to celebrate July 4th
by publishing a tough piece
about whoever the sitting president is.
And some Democrats, very predictably,
you know, I write feature stories,
[00:02:16]
I cover the presidency,
I cover presidential campaigns.
Anytime I write a story.
That's, you know, tough on a Democrat.
I'm accused of being
a conservative activist.
Anytime I write a story
that's tough on a conservative,
I'm accused of being a liberal activist.
This is something that I kind
of just expect at this point,
[00:02:33]
and it doesn't surprise me now.
It didn't surprise me, either,
that a big media corporation
like Bloomberg would be very frightened
about even just the faintest murmurs
of a of a potential optics crisis.
These are companies that, you know, pay
PR professionals probably on a retainer.
[00:02:51]
That's much more
than most journalists get,
get paid to avoid any sort of PR calamity.
And they're very worried about having to,
to deal with any pain related to any
of the content that they're producing,
so it wasn't surprised exactly
about their reaction to it.
[00:03:07]
But, you know,
it was disappointed, obviously.
And, and I think companies like that,
especially companies that are so flush
with cash, they're sort of in a position
to fight back against cancel culture.
I know people don't like that phrase,
and it's been sort of politicized beyond
[00:03:24]
recognition, but that's what this is.
And I think that they should use
that power that they have and kind of make
some more courageous decisions,
and I hope that they do so in the future.
I appreciate, sister,
I totally agree with you.
Hey, don't scroll away.
Come back, come back.
Because before the video continues,
we just want to urge you
[00:03:40]
to lend your support to TYT.
You power our honest reporting.
You do it at t.com/team
and we love you for it.
I guess my follow up question
to you is why is
this group of Democrats so unhinged?
Because I mean, they're upset at your
piece in just simply stating the truth
[00:03:58]
about Biden's mental decline and
what people around Biden were saying, not
publicly, but internally and all of that.
So because of reporting like that
and because of the realization that Biden
isn't fit to run or serve in another term,
we have a better candidate
running against Donald Trump, thus making
[00:04:16]
the election a lot more competitive.
Have these individuals come to terms
with that, or are they still in denial?
I think there's always a tendency to shoot
the messenger, and that's on both sides.
I certainly experienced us
covering Donald Trump's political rise
and covering his white House.
[00:04:32]
Most of his supporters were not happy with
me most of the time and let me know it.
But I have noticed, you know,
covering Joe Biden,
covering him even in the 2020 primary.
There is this sense that he's sort of
made of glass and that the tiniest breeze
[00:04:48]
of criticism could, could make him shatter
and that there's this,
this urge to protect him from, from any
sort of scrutiny, which I am opposed to,
obviously, as a member of the press, I
know you are all opposed to that as well.
And my my view is I'm not
concerned with outcomes.
[00:05:05]
I don't view that as my role.
As, as a journalist, I'm just
concerned with writing the most fair
and accurate stories possible.
And I understand why people are kind of.
They're angry about the way
that our politics are,
[00:05:20]
and they're looking for people to blame.
And I understand why they arrive at the
decision, whether it's conscious or not,
that members of the press
who are delivering information that they
don't like or that they wish was not true,
why we are often the ones to blame.
And I don't feel any, you know,
I don't feel aggrieved by it at all.
[00:05:36]
I sort of get it.
Yeah.
So look, we deal with that all the time.
And so if you criticize any Democrat,
they'll say, oh, you want Trump to win.
It's not my job to want
or not want Trump to win.
It's my job to deliver the news
which is reality based and truth based.
[00:05:53]
Yeah.
And so and implicit in that is
why don't you do propaganda for us.
Like, that's as if that's
what media should do.
And I can get into a long conversation
about why they have that assumption.
But what I'm curious about
is the mechanics here.
[00:06:09]
Olivia who?
So these people who come after you,
to say, Bloomberg, don't air this
or don't promote this, etc..
Who are they?
Do we think that they're democratic,
like consultants, lobbyists, trolls?
[00:06:26]
Or are they real people
who are just like, angry
that you've offended their dear leader?
It's probably a combination.
I'm sure, that those groups
feed off of one another.
I'm sure there's some sort of psyop
element to it a little bit,
but I think that people genuinely get
very upset and it's it's terrible irony.
[00:06:46]
I guess a lot of the same people who,
when I report critically on Donald Trump,
if I utilize anonymous sources,
let's say in in service
to reporting on Donald Trump, reporting
on his campaigns or his white House
in the most accurate way that I can.
[00:07:01]
Those people will praise you
to the high heavens for doing that.
If you utilize any of those same methods
to report critically on establishment
Democrats and on on President Joe Biden,
you are just raked over the coals for it.
So there's this total, you know,
[00:07:16]
these two universes that these people
operate in when it comes to how they judge
the veracity of reporting and whether
or not reporting is okay at all
when it comes to a Republican or whether,
when it comes to a Democrat.
And again, it's not something
that surprised me.
[00:07:32]
I've seen it a lot.
I've been covering, you know, what exists
of the Democratic primary over the course
of the last year, year and a half.
I've been working on a project
about Marianne Williamson, so I've seen
that from kind of that vantage point a lot
during that process, unrelated to my work
for New York magazine.
[00:07:48]
And so I wasn't surprised by any of this.
I was a little surprised
by how tiny the outrage was
and how, how Bloomberg reacted to it.
Anyway, I did think that that was,
you know, sad and, like, deeply amusing.
But these companies are risk averse.
They're trying to avoid risk.
[00:08:05]
And there's some irony.
I think they want characters.
They want personalities,
like you guys who have big followings
or who are perceived as being influential.
And then when they get that,
they're terrified about
the actual implications of that.
Yeah.
[00:08:21]
So that part I'm totally familiar with,
like Bloomberg as an example,
but it could be anybody, really.
It's almost all the major media companies.
They're like, oh, we want exactly
like you said, we want your following,
but we don't want how you got there.
When you come here,
we want you to be boring, insipid.
[00:08:37]
Don't say any of the things
that you said before.
Say the opposite.
Well, then you don't want me.
So let's just move on
and you do your boring crap
and I'll do my real reporting here.
But anyways.
But I want to come back to the blue MAGA
because I'm curious,
do they do you think that they thought
you were just lying and making up sources
[00:08:56]
and you just had a personal grudge
against Biden, so you just pretended
he was old when he's actually young?
Or did they know in your estimation
that of course you're telling the truth,
but they don't want you to tell the truth
because then Biden might lose.
So sh I don't know.
[00:09:13]
I think it's probably
a combination of those things.
I don't read, you know, everything
that someone who's angry tweets at me.
I shut my mentions off in 2016
and I haven't turned them back on.
Sometimes I'll look at a curiosity or I'll
read the comments out of curiosity.
New York magazine happens to have a pretty
robust and relatively intelligent comment
[00:09:32]
section that I find pretty valuable.
To take a look at what they're all saying.
So I do see some of it, but I don't, you
know, obsess over refreshing my mentions
or anything like that.
I don't understand people
who can live that way.
But I think it was a combination.
I also think, you know, context gets lost.
[00:09:50]
And, in the context of the internet
of like 2009 or the early 20 tens,
when I was a genuinely
a Democratic activist, right?
My job, I was an intern for a group where
my job was to write ghostwrite op eds in
[00:10:07]
support of the passage of the Affordable
Care Act when I was in high school.
And in my free time, I thought it was
really funny to troll people who were
Tea Party activists on the internet.
And I would kind of tweet dumb things
using their hashtag.
And because of the way that I look, I
think they thought that I was one of them.
[00:10:24]
And that was just something
I liked to do in my spare time as a sort
of a internet troll as a teenager,
and divorced from the context
of that internet, though of the Obama era,
I guess I could see how, you know, if some
semi-respectable people you follow online
in the year of our Lord 2024, say that I
was earnestly a birther or something.
[00:10:44]
Taking those people seriously
and not thinking too hard about, oh,
what was the internet like at that time?
And does it really seem believable,
that, you know, a decade's worth
of of my journalism
is refuted by some silly tweets from that
[00:11:00]
period of time, but I don't know,
I kind of I try and always talk
to the smartest person in the room,
and I have to hope that most people whose
opinion I would value on any other subject
would not be so, so naive and so gullible
as to to buy into that narrative.
[00:11:16]
Yeah.
I want to talk about that briefly,
because either the era of Donald Trump
broke people's brains or we have like
a serious competency problem in America,
because I want to show the the tweets
that they weaponized against you.
[00:11:32]
They're obvious jokes.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub
together can tell they're obvious jokes.
By the way, the third option,
which could be very likely, is
intentionally misinterpreting your jokes,
pretending like they're real
and you meant it in order to paint you
[00:11:48]
as some sort of racist to get you fired.
But here's one example.
Kenyan anti-colonial shows teeth to small
child retweet white House happy pi day.
Today.
I mean, that's so obviously a joke.
Here's another one.
Do you think Obama ever gets tired
of being a secret Kenyan Muslim
[00:12:05]
Muslim lizard person who plots
terror attacks from the white House?
And by the way, they went back like over
a decade in order to find these tweets,
potentially intentionally misinterpret
them, to paint you as some sort of racist,
to try to get you fired.
[00:12:21]
And luckily,
they didn't scrap your series.
But Bloomberg decided to scrap
the PR campaign around your series,
which is insane to me.
But look, final question for me, Olivia,
is there's this question of access, right?
[00:12:37]
And we talk about it here at TYT often.
If you are too critical
of a politician or a party, they're less
likely to sit down and talk with you.
A lot of journalists are concerned
about losing access,
and I think that leads some to treat these
politicians with with kid gloves.
[00:12:56]
You say that you're willing
to put out these tough pieces.
What has your experience been in terms
of access after you put these pieces out?
You know, the Biden White House or I guess
it's just sort of the Biden inner circle
never really got over my coverage of him
during the 2020 campaign cycle
[00:13:13]
or the primary cycle, rather.
You know, I wrote at the time that
there were concerns, implicit or explicit,
about his ability to stay agile
and alive for four more years.
You all remember, I'm sure,
better than a lot of other people
remember that that was a big part
of the conversation about whether or not
[00:13:30]
he ought to be the nominee in 2020.
They never really forgot that
or fully forgave it.
And they always treated me
with skepticism.
I found them to be way more locked down
than other campaigns or other members
of other political parties.
[00:13:45]
Certainly.
Whereas I found, I think leadership
is determined by whoever is at the top.
And I find that dealing with Trump,
for instance,
I just have I have a big piece out today
with interviews with Donald Trump.
He got very mad at me
about a year and a half, two years ago,
[00:14:01]
after an interview with me.
He called me dumb as rocks, unattractive.
He did the whole, like, you know, Trumpian
name thing in response to the piece.
And I figured it would take a while for
him to come back and do another interview
with me, but I knew that he would,
because that's just sort of how he is.
[00:14:17]
He. He lets out his temper
and then he gets over it eventually
if you keep trying.
And so there is a huge difference,
and I really think it just depends
on who the executive is in question
and the kind of culture that they foster.
And when it came to Joe Biden,
I think he never really had
[00:14:37]
a good relationship with the press.
He blamed the press for his first
presidential campaign not going well
for the plagiarism accusations.
He blamed the press for coverage
of him going into the 2016 race,
and whether or not he should run
to be the Democratic nominee.
And he blamed the press for negative
coverage of him during the 2020 primary.
[00:14:56]
And they have a very bitter
sort of attitude towards the media,
and I think it's hurt them.
I think it's very similar
to Hillary Clinton,
where this sort of impulse to protect
yourself and protect your campaign and
keep people who maybe are not totally with
you away actually makes you look paranoid,
[00:15:13]
and it prevents you from having
a better relationship with the public
because you're not talking
to them directly as much.
And I think we're seeing this already
with Kamala Harris not being
very accessible to the media.
And I think long term
it will negatively affect her campaign.
Yeah.
[00:15:28]
Look, there's so many things
that are so nuts.
This is going to lead into the question.
So number one, I think you guys, both you
and Ana are too generous to these folks.
They're definitely lying.
They're definitely misinterpreting
your joke on purpose.
They're definitely trying to smear you.
I've been through it many, many times.
[00:15:46]
And and then there are complicit people,
tons of them in mainstream media
who love to take democratic lies
and then print them and go, oh,
golly gee, I didn't know it was a joke.
Really? You're that dumb.
Please.
Okay, but having said that,
that gets to my question,
[00:16:02]
which is the establishment, in my opinion,
is also in their own bubble.
Not my opinion. It's a fact.
Everybody's in their own bubble.
So we always look at our own bubble
and go, wait, are we sure we're right?
What's objective reality? ET cetera.
Right.
I never see Maggie doing that.
Donald Trump could.
[00:16:18]
I mean, today they came out
with Haitian immigrants
are eating cats and dogs, and they
instantly everybody instantly believed it.
Right.
Insanity. Right.
But then in the Democratic bubble
and the blue MAGA.
Oh, Biden is young and dynamic
behind the scenes.
[00:16:33]
They instantly believe it.
And they'll attack you if you don't.
ET cetera.
But my question is for the establishment
that's in DC. Do like including
mainstream media reporters who, you know,
a lot of them write and including
the mainstream politicians, Republican
and Democrat, do they understand how much
they are hated in this country?
[00:16:51]
Do they understand that they represent
the status quo and that they that most
people think that they're giant liars
because they keep saying that
politicians are honest and they don't
point out that they're all taking
giant donor money and obviously doing
what the donors want them to do,
[00:17:07]
and that it's driving the country crazy
that they won't admit
the most obvious thing in the world.
Overwhelming corruption. Right?
Do they have.
My sense is that they
don't realize that at all.
They think that they're angels
and they represent objective reality and
[00:17:23]
and that there is no there's not
there's nothing much wrong
with the system or the status quo.
So but I but you're
in it a lot more than I am.
So it's a legitimate real question.
Like do they have any idea that they're
the establishment and that they're hated,
or do they not realize that at all?
[00:17:40]
They realize that.
I mean, I think it's it is
a monolith to some extent.
But I think, you know, there are there are
different people who are different levels
of self-aware within that.
Right?
David Foster Wallace gave a commencement
address once, and he had this story
about these two fish were sort of swimming
along, and one of the fish said something
[00:18:00]
about water to the other fish.
And the second fish says, what's water?
It's sort of like that, right?
Where I think people are so deeply in
their little universe where they're seeing
the same types of people all the time.
Everyone is also in that universe.
[00:18:16]
I think it's very easy to not really
question what you're doing and just,
just kind of keep swimming along,
not realizing what you're a part of.
And I think a lot of group think really
explains it more than malice and more
than, you know, individuals choosing to,
[00:18:33]
to do something bad or to be, cowardly.
And I think I realized this
when I was reporting that Biden piece.
I hadn't been a part of the press pool.
It's just not something that I do in my
capacity as Washington correspondent.
[00:18:49]
But I joined the press pool, which is
like this traveling group of reporters
who are always with the sitting president.
And they keep tabs on his movement,
and I asked to join
to go to some fundraisers so that I could
see the president up close for the story.
And while I was there,
I was talking to the other reporters
[00:19:06]
who were people that I know who are kind
of common presence in this press pool,
who are always in rotation.
And I was shocked by the things
that I was learning from them, just
the things that for them were just totally
normal parts of covering the president.
[00:19:22]
But to me just seemed like a scandal.
Right?
Where the radio pooler, from a from a
network whose job is to get audio and give
it out to the rest of the radio stations,
told me that often there's just
not usable audio because the president
[00:19:38]
doesn't speak very clearly.
I was part of the, you know,
reporters standing there
listening to the president speak.
I was straining my neck
and trying to find a way to hear him,
just like everyone else was,
even though none of the other speakers
at this event were difficult to hear.
[00:19:54]
And when I talked later to the rest
of the members of the press pool.
They said, oh yeah, this is a common thing
where, you know, we're all sitting around
afterwards saying, did you hear that?
Did he phrase it that way?
Are you sure that's what he said?
Where in the audio exactly was that?
And everyone's sitting around
listening to their audio, trying
[00:20:09]
to decipher it to figure out what on earth
the president just said?
I thought that this was
remarkable and shocking.
And absolutely worth telling
the world about in my story.
But when you're in that every day,
when you're part of a beat,
you're a beat reporter.
[00:20:26]
And this is true in general across
the board, no matter what your beat is,
a lot of things start to feel normal and
start to feel like just a part of the job.
And you don't have enough perspective
to say, this shouldn't be this way,
[00:20:41]
or it's remarkable that it is this way.
And that's why, you know,
I think there's a lot of value in,
coming in as a bit of an outsider
and taking a look at this stuff
for yourself and then reporting back.
Yeah. Olivia.
Great conversation.
It's just it's nice to have a conversation
where we have shared language
[00:20:59]
on objective reality.
So can can you let our audience know when
your interview shows when and where it is?
It is on Bloomberg.
You can see it for,
on Bloomberg Originals, on streaming.
I, you know, I hope you watch it,
but it's, it's,
[00:21:19]
I guess they would prefer that you didn't.
It's really the the answer.
Well, then defy them.
And do exactly
what they don't want us to do.
- Okay.
- All right.
Thank you for having me, guys.
Thank you. Olivia.
We appreciate it.
Thanks for watching The Young Turks.
Really appreciate it.
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