The media business, as practitioners know, revolves around the usual performance metrics: customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, subscription growth and churn management, weighted advertising funnels and C.P.M.s, etcetera. Executives spend their days thinking about platform dependency, rights negotiations, licensing windows, and talent—the center of an attention economy driven by stars.

But down on the newsroom floor, where reporters talk to other reporters and are often blissfully ignorant of these dynamics, the most pressing discussions tend to revert to gossip about the affairs of others, and, occasionally, debates around ethics in journalism. (Yes, actually.) And this week, dear reader, presented a smorgasbord of provocations to fuel the discourse. Better still, the debates coalesced around some of the most bold-faced names in the business and, in some cases, their own libidinal dynamics.

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Over the weekend, The New York Times christened the return of Olivia Nuzzi, the briefly disgraced New York political reporter, with an unctuous profile that played into her self-styled mystique as journalism’s femme fatale—the “modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde,” as the Times’s Jacob Bernstein put it, driving up and down the coast of Malibu in “a white Mustang convertible, like a Lana Del Rey song come to life.” The aura, inflated by cinematic black-and-white photos, deflated on Monday when her new employer, Vanity Fair, published the first excerpt from her highly anticipated new book, American Canto, documenting her affair with R.F.K. Jr. Here, seemingly aspiring to the incantatory drift of Beat poetry-prose, Nuzzi instead evidenced her own narcissism, as well as a command of the written word—most of it “punched into her phone while hiking,” per the Times—that inadvertently underscored the value of New York’s editing desk.

Not to be outdone in this egoistic arms race, Olivia’s former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, reemerged from his post-Politico wilderness to “unspool” his own account of Olivia’s infidelities on Substack. Quoting Buddha and the Stoics, Ryan said he was reluctant to be “dragged back into this tabloid mess,” then launched into a multipart dirty-laundry tell-all in which he not only revealed her intimate relations with known paramours—including Keith Olbermann, who apparently furnished Olivia with college tuition and “some $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry”—but also alleged an undisclosed relationship with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose long-shot presidential campaign she’d been assigned to cover long before she set out to profile R.F.K. Jr. on his own quixotic campaign. Ryan, who observed elsewhere in the piece that, “like bamboo, the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open,” used the Sanford detail as the cliff-hanger for the next and presumably juicier installment on his Substack—which, as you’ll recall, he’d launched in order to take on the nation’s “unprecedented moment of democratic political peril.”

Amid this star-crossed imbroglio, the media ethics knitting circle proffered an obvious and facile question: Should the political journalist who failed to disclose her love affair with a politician be getting the glossy Times profile, the Vanity Fair job, the book deal? The answer to that question, of course, was evident in their own prurient obsession with the whole saga. (As of now, Olivia is keeping her job, I’m told.) Meanwhile, caught off-guard by the Sanford revelation, few stopped long enough to notice that Ryan, too, was seeking to capitalize on his own romantic affiliation with his subject—and in cringier fashion. Therein, one can sense the true limitations of both their career prospects. If the ballad of Olivia and Ryan ends here, it is not because of Nuzzi’s violation of journalistic ethics—which obviously did not jettison her career—but rather due to the unfortunate fact that both of them have only one story to tell, and neither tells it particularly well.

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Unsurprisingly, he has been invited to brief and consult presidential aspirants and Democrats on the Hill. Thompson stated that this has “raised internal concerns at the Times”—though if that is the case, I couldn’t confirm it. Of the 10 or so Times sources I spoke to, most just praised their colleague for his impact. “Popular Opinion columnist has influence!” one Times editor quipped. “It’s not a secret that he supports Dems. It’s the premise of his career. And I think most people think it’s pretty cool that elected officials are listening to his show and seeking him out.”

Presumably there are journalists at the Times who chafe at Ezra’s “columnist-turned-operative role”—either envious second-tier journalists who never got the investment and T.L.C. that Ezra or Sorkin or Maggie have and resent their own exclusion from the Times star system, or, more likely, seasoned veterans who sense an ethical transgression while forgetting that previous columnists wielded similar influence. Nick Kristof so relished his role as a Democratic powerbroker that he caught the bug and tried politics himself, only to be rejected in Oregon. In any event, as you’ve probably surmised, speaking to a group of Senate Democrats is a pretty far cry from sending them nudes or even early drafts.