Don’t fall for shifting media narratives about Hegseth’s responsibility or the Nuzzi-Lizza mess

Beware the narrative shift. Two stories that have become media obsessions are slowly being recast. One is deadly serious; the other is ridiculous, although it nevertheless says a lot about journalism ethics.

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First, the deadly serious story. We are beginning to see the emergence of a narrative that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is in the clear, more or less, as long as he can show that he didn’t order a second attack on that boat in the Caribbean in order to kill two wounded crew members.

Donald Trump added to that notion, saying he “wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.” Hegseth himself has contributed to that shift, according to Adam Cancryn of CNN:

But Hegseth on Tuesday also denied any direct role in targeting the survivors, saying he’d empowered Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley to make all of the operational decisions — and had left the room well before it became clear that some of the people on the boat had survived.

“I watched that first strike live,” Hegseth said. “I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting.”

The Trump brigade on social media is at it as well. Consider this tweet from Ryan Saavedra of the right-wing Daily Wire:

🚨 BREAKING: The New York Times reports that the story from The Washington Post that alleged that @PeteHegseth ordered narcoterrorists who survived an attack to be killed is *false*

From the article: “The Post article did not provide context on when Mr. Hegseth gave what its sources described as a spoken order to kill everyone.”

The problem, contrary to what Trump and Hegseth are suggesting, and what Saavedra is flat-out asserting, is that The Washington Post, in its original report, did not say that Hegseth ordered a second strike. Instead, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima wrote that Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” — that is, all 11 crew members. Bradley’s order was in line with Hegseth’s, and thus Hegseth’s pathetic attempt to hang this on Bradley even while praising him as “an American hero” doesn’t cut it.

Hegseth and Bradley may very well have committed a serious crime — murder, or even a war crime if their unprovoked attacks, which have killed more than 80 people so far, can somehow be regarded as an armed conflict. And Trump is every bit as complicit as Hegseth and Bradley.

Lizza’s lame revelations

The second narrative shift involves Olivia Nuzzi, the journalist who resigned from New York magazine more than a year ago after independent media reporter Oliver Darcy revealed (sub. req.) that she was involved in some sort of unexplained non-touching sexual relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even as she was writing political stories about Joe Biden, Trump and Kennedy himself.

As I’m sure you know, she’s back with a memoir, “American Canto.” I’ve read the excerpt (sub. req.) that Vanity Fair published, and it may be the single worst piece of published professional writing I’ve ever encountered. But what I want to call your attention to is a series of paywalled posts by her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, on Substack that go into greater detail about her journalistic misdeeds. Those include alleged “catch and kill” operations to keep negative stories about RFK Jr. out of the press and allegedly having a sexual affair with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford while she was profiling him.

On social media, at least, this has brought condemnation of Lizza for sitting on Very Important Stories that could have somehow altered the course of the 2024 campaign. But what, really, have we learned that we didn’t already know? Some additional details, yes. Yet the full extent of Nuzzi’s corruption was known several months before the election.

everyone knows the number one quality of rigorous, responsible journalism is waiting months and months to reveal urgently newsworthy information until it can cause the most harm in your personal vendettas

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg.bsky.social) 2025-11-26T22:53:27.906Z

As we knew at the time, and as I wrote, Nuzzi produced a memorable takedown of Biden and his fading mental acuity while she was carrying on with Kennedy, who at that time was pursuing an independent presidential campaign. And she wrote a sympathetic profile of Trump after Kennedy had pulled out of the race and was angling for a high-level position in a possible Trump White House. As I said in September 2024:

What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.

What Lizza is doing now is sleazy, for sure. But there’s nothing he’s telling us that would have made any difference if he’d put it out there 15 months earlier. In any case, Politico placed Lizza on leave after Nuzzi filed a protective order against him in September 2024. He started his newsletter, Telos.News, a few months later, but I doubt he was doing very well with it until recently. In other words, he didn’t owe anything to anyone, and I’d think more highly of him if he’d continued to keep his mouth shut.

As for Nuzzi, her comeback has stalled. Her book isn’t selling, and her temporary gig as West Coast editor for Vanity Fair is not likely to be renewed, according to Max Tani of Semafor.

What a mess.