The Clinton Rules and the Trump Rules

Judd Legum has been given the emails hacked by the Trump campaign, and has determined that there’s nothing in them newsworthy enough to justify the violation of privacy and the collaboration with foreign ratfuckers publishing them would entail. This is a reasonable judgment in itself. As Legum notes again, however, the standards in 2016 were radically different:

Media organizations, including the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the National Review, and others, isolated a handful of my private emails to Podesta and used them as grist for articles that attacked my integrity and professionalism. I believe these insinuations were unfounded, but I was forced to defend my reputation in the media and with my colleagues at ThinkProgress, where I worked before starting this newsletter. 

I was a bit player in this drama, but it is still disturbing to have your private communications stolen by a foreign government and broadcast by major media outlets. 

As Popular Information previously reported, outlets like Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times produced dozens of unflattering articles and blog posts about Podesta’s emails. Everything was fair game, from Podesta’s risotto recipe to his use of the word “prick” to describe a journalist he didn’t like. 

There were a few tidbits of news buried in Podesta’s emails, but no significant scandal. Most of the coverage amounted to little more than voyeurism. A Politico “live blog” of Podesta’s stolen emails had more than 50 entries published over three weeks. “All the Juiciest Dirt in The Podesta E-mails, Explained,” Vanity Fair headlined a November 3, 2016 article that was representative of the coverage.

Unlike the Trump campaign materials from “Robert,” Podesta’s emails were posted online by Wikileaks. But the media played a critical role in amplifying the material and turning a collection of mostly anodyne emails into an ongoing scandal. The media also did not verify the authenticity of the hacked materials. The Clinton campaign declined to review 50,000 emails and contest or validate each one. The New York Times and others interpreted that as proof that they were all legitimate. 

The coverage lasted for weeks because the stolen emails were released by Wikileaks in small batches. Each time a new batch of emails was released, the media swung into action, mining the stolen materials for any morsel that could be used in a story. There appeared to be little concern that both the content and cadence of political coverage at a critical juncture of the election was being dictated by foreign actors. 

The New York Times published at least 199 articles about the stolen emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day. The New York Times Editorial Board wrote that any negative impact their coverage had on the Clinton campaign was Hillary Clinton’s fault for not voluntarily releasing the information contained in the stolen emails. “Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release,” the New York Times Editorial Board wrote on October 22, 2016. “[E]veryone would have long since moved on.”

The media frenzy over Podesta’s emails was actively encouraged by Trump and his campaign. On July 26, 2016, Trump publicly implored Russia to acquire Clinton’s internal emails, promising that the media would amplify them. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said. (It was later revealed that Russia began targeting Clinton campaign officials “on or around” the same day.) 

When Wikileaks began posting the emails acquired by Russian hackers, Trump celebrated. He publicly mentioned WikiLeaks 141 times in the month before the election. “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania on October 10, 2016.

The decisions made in 2016 were indefensible, and shouldn’t necessarily be the baseline going forward. The problem is that until the standard that governed 2016 could affect Trump the consensus within the media was that the coverage in 2016 was fine and critics were just whiners who think that Hillary Clinton ran a flawless campaign:

Thus far, the three major outlets that have acknowledged they also received stolen Trump campaign materials from Robert — Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — have also declined to publish them. None of these outlets, however, have explained why their approach to stolen Trump campaign materials is so different from their approach to stolen Clinton campaign documents. 

Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray, for example, said he “thought about who was likely to be leaking the [Trump] documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.” But in 2016, the paper knew that Russia was likely behind the hack of the documents and was using them to interfere with the presidential election. Nevertheless, the Washington Post’s coverage included excerpts that were not, by any fair definition, “truly newsworthy.” 

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Politico should be transparent about their decision-making and explain why it has changed dramatically over the last eight years. 

Needless to say, the lack of explanation does not give one much confidence that the 2024 standard rather than the 2016 standard will be applied the next time emails are hacked from a Democratic campaign and ratfuckers use them to try to help the Republican campaign.