Oui, journalists should report on hacked emails

For journalists, binge-publishing from hacked computers accounts resembles gorging on bargain seafood. The first tasty helpings are so satisfying that many reporters don’t notice a sick feeling rising their throats until well into the banquet.

Such expressions of post-hacking information sickness marble the coverage of the purloined Sony, John Podesta and Democratic National Committee emails. Writing in Slate in 2014, Jacob Weisberg called on journalists to “voluntarily withhold publication” of the Sony materials because the emails raised no issues of public interest. Aaron Sorkin went further in a New York Times op-ed, castigating every news outlet publishing from the Sony hacks as “morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable.” Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn asked the press last summer “to think twice about being an eager conduit for stolen goods,” a sentiment echoed by NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen in October. At the Intercept, writer Naomi Klein lamented to Glenn Greenwald her misgivings over the reporting on the Podesta and DNC emails. WikiLeaks had dumped the in a way to “maximize damage” to the Hillary Clinton campaign and assist Donald Trump, Klein complained.

Now comes the shrimp gumbo of the emails alleged hacked from the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, elected French president on Sunday. Writing over the weekend in BuzzFeed, scholar Zeynep Tufekci urged the French press not to “get played the way the U.S. press got played” in the Clinton hacks. The media’s top story about the email hacks should be “political sabotage,” she wrote, and only verified claims of “news truly in the public interest: gross misconduct; major corruption; criminal actions” need be reported. “In an era of information glut, what we chose not to report on, what we chose not to amplify, and what misinformation campaign we choose not to surrender to is the name of the game,” she concluded. (Emphasis in the original.)

These genuine anxieties over publishing hacked materials seem to confuse the scale of the hacks with their content. That is to say: Nobody would hold that a dozen emails leaked from Sony, the DNC, Podesta or the Macron campaign to the press constituted a crisis of journalism. Indeed, every day the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and other media outposts publish from scores of documents and communications leaked to them, some of which arise from acts of theft. Had Podesta’s risotto email been the only document released by WikiLeaks, or a New York Times reporter’s suck-up letter to a Sony executive been the sole hack to see the light of day, I can guarantee you that both would have been published far and wide for the way they reveal both authors’ characters, with little chatter about a loss of privacy.

What nettles the critics about the publication of hacked information is not necessarily the contents but its sheer, gluttonous volume—and the nefarious political intent of the pilferers—presumably the Russians and the North Koreans. That publication gladdened the hearts of the Russians and North Koreans and advanced their agendas doubly outrages the critics. To paraphrase Tufekci, the gullible press fell into the trap set for them.

Can journalists categorically reject the idea that something should remain unpublish because it might delight a foreign power? Can they ignore the sentiments of the Hippocratic Oath to “first do no harm”? Well, yes. The right of the press to ignore the state’s wishes was expressed definitively in 1852 when John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London, wrote two editorials rejecting advice from soon-to-be prime minister Lord Derby that reporters adopt moderation and show respect for power if they expected to keep its influence in Parliament. “If in these days, the Press aspires to exercise the influence of statesmen, the Press should remember they are not free from the corresponding responsibilities of statesmen,” Lord Derby said.

Delane’s cracking response, which glows as brightly as a desert sunrise, is worth quoting at length. He wrote:

The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means keeps it back; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and history of our times; it is daily and for ever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion—anticipating, if possible, the march of events—standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizons of the world. The duty of the Press is to speak; of the statesman to be silent. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear or consequences.

A free press need never be “responsible” if “responsible” means covering only those subjects and materials the government and its supporters have approved. The press exists to serve its readers, to expand the political discussion beyond what custom, taboo and political tradition allow, and most important, to scrutinize the permanent government in all its guises. If the press stops sharing what it has learned with its readers, it becomes an adjunct to power instead of an independent navigator.

Some critics of the probing press believe that the public must be protected from certain classes of information lest they be “confused” and “disinformed,” or that they publish something that might inspire Vladimir Putin to light up one of his rare smiles. Who can we trust outside the press to build those barriers? Nobody comes to mind. The call to suppress all hacked information is a cure worse than the disease. If the goal isn’t to suppress all, hacks, just the “bad” ones, who do we want to deputize to distinguish them from the good ones?

Consider: Would the anxieties over the hacked Macron materials have ascended to such heights had the targets been a Republican and the Republican establishment? An imperfect example exists that helps test that question. The confidential Steele dossier about Trump, eventually published by BuzzFeed, began its life as a piece of confidential opposition research commissioned by an anti-Trump figure. The All-American purpose of oppo, as everybody knows, is to undermine—or sabotage—the candidate on the other side, but anonymously. Campaigns produce reams of it each election, and traditionally dispense it to reporters with a gavage, the barnyard instrument used to force-feed a pâté goose. Journalists at the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Poynter and elsewhere damned the Steele dossier’s publication but nearly every major news organization publicized its incendiary and prurient assertions. The outrage over the Steele dossier never approached the furor that greeted the hacked emails, suggesting that the establishment thinks Republicans aren’t as deserving of protections from “political sabotage” as Democrats.

So, go ahead and cringe over the analysis and publication of hacked materials. Just you understand that it’s the macro version of the micro thing the press does every day. And it’s legal, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in Bartnicki v. Vopper, when it properly held that the First Amendment allows the publication of illegally intercepted communications. The only defect in that ruling is that it contains no footnote stating that behind most great works of journalism is a daring theft or a stunning betrayal of confidence.

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Yes, Delane wrote “for ever” as two words, so don’t send a correction to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have never been hacked. My Twitter feed has never met Guccifer 2.0. My RSS feed designs to sabotage my alerts and Twitter.