The media rushed to release the hacked DNC emails in 2016. And what about Trump? – Media Nation

Leaked emails from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have found their way to major news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico.

Given what happened in 2016, when the press published a series of embarrassing emails hacked by WikiLeaks from the Democratic National Committee’s email server, you might expect that the Trump files would be released once they were reviewed. Right? Well, no.

As Jon Passantino and Liam Reilly reports for CNN:

But while the June hack sparked an uproar within the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, the three news organizations that obtained the files held off on releasing information from the trove. The decision was a reversal from the 2016 election, when news outlets breathlessly reported embarrassing and damaging stories about Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Russian hackers stole a cache of Democratic National Committee emails and posted them on the website Wikileaks.

The news media – and the Times in particular – have a long and mostly honorable tradition of publishing newsworthy documents, regardless of how they came to be. These include the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, and reports on the secret and illegal wiretapping program of the George W. Bush administration.

So why this hesitation about the Trump files possibly being hacked by Iran? As I told CNN:

News organizations should be cautious when dealing with hacked documents. As long as they’re verified and newsworthy, they’re fair game, but motive is also an important part of the story. In 2016, too many news outlets ran stories about the Democratic National Committee emails without questioning why WikiLeaks, which had ties to the Russian government, had hacked them in the first place.

In other words, do two things at once. Report on the documents and report on the leakers’ motives. This was the standard that retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron took in his memoir, Collision of Power, when he described his concerns about the Post’s decision to publish the WikiLeaks files on a large scale during the 2016 election campaign:

A far bigger story was emerging, and the press took too long to fully communicate it: Russia was aggressively interfering in a presidential election. A rival superpower was doing what it could to put Donald Trump in the White House. At The Washington Post, we learned a lesson: If a hacking attack like this one were to happen in the future, we would focus more on who was behind it and why, and not let the content of the stolen information distract us from the hackers’ motives.

Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring told CNN: “Politico editors concluded, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions about the origin of the documents and how we became aware of them were more newsworthy than the material contained in those documents.”

Let us see for ourselves.