Look again at the Nuzzi affair. Because when our politics and media are so debased, the joke’s on us | Nesrine Malik

One upside of adversity is art, inspiring cultural output that seeks to process and channel suffering. “I’ll say one thing about Thatcher, some fantastic songs were written during her reign,” said the Irish singer Christy Moore once – before belting out a goosebump-raising rendition of Ordinary Man by Peter Hames, a song about the 1980s recession. That is, so far, the only upside of the publication of Olivia Nuzzi’s book American Canto, an affliction to journalism, politics and publishing: there has been some fantastic writing since it all kicked off.

Masterful reviews. Very funny commentary. Scathing analysis. But first, a summary of events for readers of this column, most of whom I assume are well-adjusted, offline people, with better things to do with their time than follow what can only be described as a niche beef. Nuzzi is (or perhaps was, keep reading) a celebrated US political journalist who had a “digital affair” with Robert F Kennedy Jr while he was running for president, broke all sorts of journalistic rules while doing so, and was fired from her job at New York magazine. RFK Jr went on to become Donald Trump’s anti-vaccine health secretary, Nuzzi has published a book about the whole affair, and her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza – another political journalist – has been dripfeeding revelations about how she cheated on him, and a litany of other personal and professional transgressions. There are no heroes here.

For a while, it was all good, low-stakes fun for casual observers. And then suddenly, at the risk of sounding po-faced and unable to enjoy a nice little scandal unblemished by sympathetic characters, it wasn’t. Less a diversion, and more the final poisoned fruit of several cross-pollinating strands.

A new media landscape has hoved into view. Most of the debacle has been litigated on Substacks, independent podcasts and personal websites. Lizza claimed his belated revelations on his own newsletter about Nuzzi’s infractions, which, he said, included her helping RFK Jr in his run for president by sharing intel from sources, were in the public interest – the public in this instance being those signed up to Lizza’s Substack, who first gained free tidbits before being ushered to a paywall. Nuzzi herself, barring one glossy profile in the New York Times, has given her exclusive updates to other newsletter writers and podcasters. The froth of it all swirled on social media. Step back, and ask: “But is it journalism?” The answer is: definitely not. But I’m still not sure what it is.

On the face of it we are talking about big and serious things – political and journalistic accountability, the role of the media in the Trump era, “love of country”, as Nuzzi herself puts it. But it all feels like a pantomime performance of such things: to quote Tom Wolfe, journalism as “a cup of tea on the way to … eventual triumph” as something else. And that something else is, above everything, the brand – a person whose most important role is to be the main character, with professional failings and personal squalor as details that make up a colourful, compelling whole. What is most interesting about both Nuzzi and Lizza is their careful plot-curation. Never mind that Lizza sat on what he says is germane information about RFK Jr for months, and that Nuzzi had an undisclosed relationship with a political player while being a political reporter (“I was fired,” she shot back impatiently, when pressed really quite gently on her bad behaviour). What you have here folks, is a story! Lizza serialises it in soapy whodunit. Nuzzi writes it in disconnected fragments, casting a soft-focus dream-like filter. Scripted reality, but for journalism.

And the story, depending on whom you believe, is either of a woman who fell in love and is being punished for being a talented, beautiful risk-taking enfant terrible, or of a treacherous self-involved narcissist. But it’s really mostly about decay. About Trumpism outside Trump, that heady sense that anything could happen and nothing matters, and everything is so up for grabs that a man such as RFK Jr could manoeuvre himself into one of the highest offices in the land, and a journalist who interviewed him once could emerge as the kingmaker. The question to ask isn’t, “why would you wager so much on a man with deadly politics and become obsessed with him and his ambition?” It’s “why not?”

Why not? After a Joe Biden presidency that incinerated faith in him and the Democratic establishment, as he clung on way past what was responsible (Nuzzi herself, breaking with the pack, reported on a “conspiracy of silence”). Why not? When the likelihood is that you would be welcomed back into the fold anyway if you got caught, as Nuzzi was when she was hired by Vanity Fair (she writes that she was shocked to have been pulled up on her actions at all, as someone who had always been indulged for being “good for business”). And why not, when a sort of general unravelling of the mainstfream media is unfolding? Increasingly, parts of it are owned by openly partisan money men, partnering with high-profile ideologically contentious figures such as Bari Weiss, now editor-in-chief of CBS News, and the rest are struggling, open to the life-saving overtures and diktats of such money men. Nuzzi was let go from Vanity Fair last week, but business is bad, and she will either be good for it, or for somewhere else soon, or simply herself become the business, in this new growing ecosystem.

Out of the sinkholes of journalism and politics rises the journalism influencer. A hybrid, both narrator and protagonist, who scoffs at judgment as either cringe or motivated, and becomes ever more skilled and brazen in detached yarn-spinning; finessing away active roles, complicities and abuse of access.

The sad realisation in the queasy aftermath of this heady scandal is that there are no personas more fitting for the time. There may be a cracking chorus of literary and political lament around both Nuzzi and Lizza, but they together are borne forward not only through their own lusts, but also by inexorable forces of political and journalistic degeneration.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist