Nation’s political press decides without explanation that it can only publish campaign emails provided by foreign ratfuckers in extreme cases
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Politico published a story about the possible hack on Saturday. Editorsthere decided that, based on what their journalists knew at the time, “the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents,” said a Politico spokesperson. He declined to go into more details on sourcing and reporting methods.
The Post likewise focused on the possible hack and published its story later Saturday. The New York Times on Monday reported that it had received “a similar if not identical trove of data” from what was sent to Politico; a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the thinking on whether to publish the document.
In 2016, Trump relished Russian hacks of Democratic campaign emails, once asking the country to find more of Hillary Clinton’s emails with the phrase, “Russia, if you’re listening.”
But in the aftermath of its own possible hack, the Trump campaign told reporters that to publish the material would be assisting a foreign state actor in undermining democracy. “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement.
The decision for newsrooms to not publish the Vance materials — a compilation of publicly available records and statements, including Vance’s past criticisms of Trump — appeared to be morestraightforward because they also didn’t reach a high level of public interest.
I’m sorry, but the idea that all, or even a majority, or even a significant number of the stories published about the Podesta and DNC emails in 2016 cleared a “high level of public interest” standard is intelligence insulting. Conveniently, the dedicated blog Politico set up about the Podesta emails — that’s right — and was still updating the evening of Election Day is still up. In includes stories like “yet another update about how Hillary Clinton was told that a debate in Flint, MI would include a question about tainted water” and “Clinton camp in 2015 eyed Granholm to head DNC.” The idea that emails that apparently contain damaging information about the highly unpopular Republican choice for vice president among other things does not rise to this level is simply absurd.
The media’s decision-making in 2016 was admittedly indefensible. But as Brian Beutler says if the media as suddenly decided that material provided by ratfuckers can only be published in extreme cases it owes us a detailed explanation and mea culpa:
This stands in untenable contrast to the way these same outlets responded to the hacking-and-leaking of Democratic emails in 2016. A hallmark of Trump-era journalism has been the media’s institutional defensiveness of its conduct in the run up to Trump’s first election. Precious few reporters have retrospectively acknowledged that their 2016 fixation on emails (both the ones on Hillary Clinton’s personal server, and the ones that were stolen from her colleagues) fell beneath professional standards. Most reporters, and nearly all decision makers, insist they did nothing wrong—at most they’ll allow that their failures that cycle were garden variety.
“When we learn important things, to not publish is a political act,” the Times’s then-executive editor Dean Baquet insisted in retrospect. “The calculation cannot be, we’re just not going to publish because that would screw up American politics. You know, at that point, I will go into business as like a campaign adviser to people and not as a journalist.”
Two election cycles later, you can be forgiven for wondering whether this was a put on.
“Hopefully (seriously) Trump will benefit from what the media learned in 2016, when it got played by state-sponsored hackers into publishing a drip-drip of Clinton information on the hackers’ schedule,” wrote Semafor founder Ben Smith. “Which is to say — journalists can/should report seriously on real documents that shed light on real stories, but should also foreground the hackers’ motives and not publish personal information gratuitously. And, in general, not treat a drip-drip of random documents as hot scoops.”
This statement will come as some surprise to Clinton campaign veterans. For years, the notion that the media “got played by state-sponsored hackers” and worked “on the hackers’ schedule” has been the province of Democrats and media critics, not of the journalists who engaged in the emails feeding frenzy.
If they’ve embraced the criticism, though—if Politico and the Washington Post and the New York Times suddenly have the same misgivings about their 2016 conduct that Smith does, they have a choice to make: They can either hold Trump to the same standard as Clinton, and cover the contents of his campaign’s emails breathlessly. Or, for the first time in nearly a decade, they can be candid with their subscribers regarding their past failures. Otherwise, they will have chosen, de facto, to thumb the scales of our elections for Donald Trump.
My guess is that we will get the double standard that helps Trump both ways with no acknowledgment that serious mistakes were made in 2016 or explanation for why standards have radically changed, the worst of all worlds.