Trump Email Hack Is A Moment Of Reckoning For Him—Or The News Media

Outlets like the New York Times owe their readers frenzied coverage of his campaign's emails, or a mea culpa for their history-altering emails fixation in 2016

You might say Politico won the weekend with a metascoop.

On Saturday, reporter Alex Isenstadt published a brief exclusive, noting that he and his colleagues had obtained reams of hacked Trump campaign emails from a seemingly pseudonymous source. The series of disclosures began in late July, and includes a nearly 300-page dossier full of opposition research Trump aides compiled in the course of vetting JD Vance for the vice presidency.

The Trump campaign seems to have confirmed the authenticity of at least some of these files, and claims (plausibly, but without elaboration) that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the hack.

But for the weekend’s purposes, that was all Politico chose to report. Not, say, a story about Vance’s vulnerabilities; a story about having a story about Vance’s vulnerabilities. A metascoop.

Now it seems that whoever hacked the Trump campaign (or whoever obtained the emails from the hacker) later supplied the stolen contents to the Washington Post and New York Times.

As of Monday, these outlets have seen fit only to publish cursory descriptions of the hacked documents they’ve obtained, not to divulge their contents, build whole stories around them, or publish them in full.

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.

TRUMPTY DUMPTY

There is at least one important difference, at least for now, between the hack-and-dump operations of 2016 and the one that seems to have targeted Trump.