Trump hack continued into last week

Legum writes that “it was tempting to use this opportunity to turn the tables on the Trump campaign and publish the stolen campaign materials provided to me by Robert. But I believe that is the wrong approach.”

“The internal Trump campaign documents obtained by Popular Information may be embarrassing or problematic to members of the Trump campaign. Some of the documents have news value. But the stolen materials do not provide the public with any fundamental new insight about Trump or his campaign. So, on balance, the relevant factors argue against publication,” he wrote.

That’s the same decision that major publications reached on other documents, and I think that’s the right call when it comes to the document Legum shared with me.

The media’s caution with the Trump hack is obviously ironic: The lessons we learned at Hillary Clinton’s expense in 2016 will now benefit Trump, who cheered the Russian hacking operation.

But the details of the situation also reveal how complex and gray these decision about publication are — multifactor balancing acts more than matters of black-and-white ethics.

Purists may say that journalists should ignore sources’ motivations, which run the gamut from pure-hearted whistleblower to disgruntled employee to intelligence agency of an adversarial power.

But in reality, editors constantly balance those questions with newsworthiness, and the refusal to publish the Trump leaks reflects a presumption against publishing the product of spies’ hacks — but not a hard rule against it.

These appear to have been, so far, easy calls. I wouldn’t have posted the legal letter if Trump’s campaign sent it as a press release, and so I obviously won’t cover its substance as the product of a hack.

But unsettled questions remain. For instance, what about the product of American espionage? American journalists don’t exactly scruple to print intercepts of Russian communications leaked by the US government.

Legum, at least, has done something that major American publications hanging onto the Trump leaks haven’t: He’s explained himself, in context. Democrats are rightly furious at, for instance, Politico for its 2016 live-blog of Wikileaks trivia. The US media has, I think (and Legum also writes), made a real mistake in failing to reckon with the errors of 2016, and to explain its current decisions fully in that light.

(I was editing BuzzFeed at the time, and we were more restrained but not perfect. We wrote a half-dozen stories off Wikileaks, and tried to foreground the news of the Russian attack itself — a far bigger story than the substance of the leaks. I recall deciding that excerpts of a secret Hillary Clinton speech, released by hackers to distract us from the Access Hollywood scandal, were clearly newsworthy, and we reported on them. But it’s not the kind of reporting you feel great about, and not everything we published meets that bar.)

I was, coincidentally, on a panel at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative last week to discuss these questions, and the editors there agreed that these are hard decisions. There, the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, suggested, mostly in jest, that perhaps the target of the hack wasn’t really the Trump campaign at all.

What better way to attack the American press, he asked, than to give us boring, useless leaked documents that they would feel obliged not to publish — and then leave themselves open to a new attack for participating in a cover-up?

That’s an argument for, at least, some kind of transparency about how we make our decisions.

“It is a bit rich for legacy media institutions to be acting so stuffily responsible when it’s Trump (apparently) getting the hack-and-leak treatment,” wrote The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper, under the headline, “Dear Hackers: Please Send Me the Trump Campaign Emails.” He concluded: “If anyone on earth has earned some gossipy tabloid coverage of his personal communications, it’s him.”