Ryan Lizza on Monday said he “recently left” Politico, where he was the chief Washington correspondent for six years, to launch his own Substack account. Lizza becomes the latest high-profile journalist to leave a well-known outlet for Substack.
His exit also comes after he had to stop co-authoring Playbook for Politico last year after his ex-fiancée Olivia Nuzzi’s “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surfaced.
Lizza, in an intro to his Substack blog dubbed Telos, said the “main reason” he left Politico is because “their style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing.”
He continued: “I know that sounds dramatic, but the gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how it was being framed and reported became much too wide.”
Lizza also said he did not mean to pick on the media too hard, because every institution on “Trump’s enemies list” is “struggling” with how to respond to his second presidency. Still, he ripped ABC News, noting that they “caved” to Trump for settling a lawsuit with him for $15 million in December.
“Unfortunately, at [Politico], things weren’t much better,” Lizza said. “I saw up close how easy it was for a media conglomerate to grovel before the Trump administration when the wrong people are in charge.”
Politico sent a White House reporter to CPAC to “smooth things over” with Trump, Lizza said, after DOGE found the federal government was paying for subscriptions to the outlet earlier this year. Lizza called the conference a “sewer of media bashing and cheerleading for the degradation of our democracy” and that it was “regrettable” that Politico wanted to be on the president’s good side.
Lizza did not reference the “personal relationship” Nuzzi had with Kennedy last year or whether it was a contributing factor in his decision to leave Politico. Lizza agreed to not co-author Playbook, Politico’s daily newsletter, following the Nuzzi-Kennedy story coming out last Sep. Nuzzi left New York Magazine after the digital relationship came to light.
A number of other well-known media members have joined Substack recently, including Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz. Other big-name reporters who have found a home there include Matt Taibbi and Seymour Hersh.
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