We Exist in A Context: Assessing Media Decision Making in Political Coverage
Journalism plays a vital role in any healthy democracy. At its best, journalism informs and encourages civic activity. I am, painfully, aware those are lofty ideals. I pointedly did not become a real journalist because I, frankly, did not want to do deal with the internal newsroom politics. We are at pivotal point as a society. Journalists want to play an important role, as they have throughout history. They have failed in both the 2016 and 2020 elections to meet the moment. 2016 stands out as the more grievous failure because we would unlikely have faced such moments in 2020 and again in 2024 had they not failed so utterly in 2016.
My consistent thesis for the basic failure of mainstream American media (particularly legacy) in 2016 to properly warn and educated the public about the dangers and unfitness for office of Donald Trump is that the media struggled to differentiate (whether by choice or not is a separate, but valid question) of two flawed candidates. One was flawed in very conventional ways (Hillary) while the other was flawed in ways that manifestly made them unfit for higher office (Donald). This basic failure can, in my view, explain why they would treat issues like Hillary’s email serve with the same seriousness as, say, having multiple credible allegations of domestic and intimate partner violence against women. I do not wish to relitigate the broader failure of the media in the 2016 campaign; and many people have also argued, credibly, that other factors go into this basic failure of journalism.
What I do want to focus on, and what caused my brain to decide writing a longform post was a good idea, is the ethics of publishing stolen campaign materials, such as emails. In 2016, Hillary’s emails featured prominently in campaign coverage — the Columbia Journalism Review (Watts and Rothschild) found that front page news in the nation’s largest media outlets overwhelming featured more stories about her emails than they did policy or other issues. They wrote: “In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” This underlines the serious failure by the media in 2016 was in distinguishing between issues arising from Hillary’s decision to use, as Secretary of State, a private email server and issues stemming from the illegal hacking of her campaign and campaign staff accounts by agents we now know to have been in the employ of Russian intelligence services and in collusion with the Trump campaign.
Often in defending themselves, legacy media will point to the dearth of articles they published on the various and (somehow) still ongoing scandals around Trump. Again, I am not interested in rehashing those arguments — I want to focus on the decisions major media outlets made during that campaign. Virtually all the legacy outlets failed to correctly distinguish between the two sets of emails, which kept the story in the news for virtually the entire campaign. Now as we approach the final days of another presidential campaign, many of the same outlets are, seemingly, making a very different editorial decision regarding a campaign’s stolen emails.
On August 11, NPR reported that the Trump campaign claimed it had been the victim of hacking of several campaign and campaign staffer emails by agents working on behalf the Iranian government. Those claims were later corroborated by federal government authorities. (It should be noted that Democrats were also targeted in the same spearfishing attack but did not appear to have been hacked.) Shortly after, many major news organizations including Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times let it be known they had received and authenticated the emails and had been sitting on them.
To date, none of the aforementioned outlets have published any of the material. According to a story published by CNN, Politico reported it had begun receiving copies of the emails as early as July 22 and that they contained “internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance’s potential vulnerabilities. Politico was also sent portions of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had been among the contenders to join Trump on the GOP ticket.”
The Post said at the time: “As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”
From a professional standpoint, this is exactly what I would hope anyone would say in this position. It is, in fact, the duty of journalists to assess those factors when deciding what is and is not newsworthy. But, and this is crucial, we can use our fucking brains here people.
A serious question, and one I have not heard a good response from, is why were John Podesta’s emails about his tips for making risotto newsworthy, and internal communications about what the Trump campaign was thinking about JD Vance ahead of his nomination not? For that matter, do you honestly believe that if the situation were reversed that the same media that spent nearly a month playing stenographer for the court intrigue following the June Debate would not have published emails about the Harris vetting process?
There is, I believe, a case to be made that publishing stolen material about a campaign should require a high-level discussion of very real ethical concerns. However, it is also the duty of the media to explain why they believe those concerns are overriding. As the Post’s statement highlights, the need to assess authenticity of the material is legitimate. If what they have is, in fact, not authentic they should say so (see: Hunter Biden). Simply hand waving undermines their credibility.
The media has a duty to the truth (subjective as that is), and it is worth considering the motives of anyone who passes information to you; but ultimately the thing that every story that is published must (or should) undergo is its value as news. There are differing definitions on this and many concern questions about the outlet itself and its mission, but to get to the heart of it, but those do not apply to large, national publications like the Times, which proudly and repeatedly likes to remind people it is the paper of record. To summarize for you, briefly, newsworthiness test can largely be understood as a balance of a few factors: accuracy/truth of claims; relevance to the audience; recency; predictably/expectedness (a tornado in a large metro area that is not prone to them is more likely to garner news coverage than one in area prone to them); whether an event or issue is ongoing (like, say, a campaign); and the social status of the subject. An additional factor many academic writing on the topic highlight is that, historically speaking, editors generally have given preference to ‘negative’ stories. Any publishing decision is made, more or less, along these lines at any media outlet worth a shit. It is, in fact, what is supposed to separate them from tabloid rags, which are simply out to make money. These decisions are not made in a vacuum (and even if they are in the newsroom, they absolutely aren’t in the view of the public) and the wild inconsistencies in how these same outlets are treating, essentially, the same kind of information, obtained in the same ways, is painfully obvious.
We also live in the context of all that has come before us and, as a young journalist in training at the time, I remember vividly the debate inside the profession over the decision by outlets, such as the Times, to publish leaked information regarding what the government did (or did not) know about efforts by the Bush administration to mislead the country into invading Iraq. There was also considerable debate in the professional press about the ethics of publishing photos of caskets of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan despite DOJ policy against it. This was also happening at the same time the Times was going to bat for Judith Miller for her role in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame along with Robert Novak. This is to say nothing of two major historical events that the Times and Post hold up as evidence of the important role they play in society — the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate.
In most, if not all, of the cases I have just mentioned there was and is a reasonable argument against publishing materials obtained through illegal means and by people whose interests were, let’s say, less than charitable. For example, one could argue that publishing Valerie Plame’s identity endangered her life and did little to advance the truth in the public interest and in fact served the Bush administration’s propaganda. And yet, the very same news organizations are now making very different choices? Why is that?
I have considered this for a long time. I can understand, as I said, making a decision not to publish the material they’ve obtained in the emails of Trump campaign officials; but the rub is that those decisions would rest on information about the contents that, to date, none of the outlets have been willing to share. The Times response to questions from CNN about these decisions was brusque at best, and a complete finger to journalistic transparency at worst.
In the absence of such exculpatory evidence, we are left to judge outlets on the evidence available to us. That evidence is not particularly convincing. None of the outlets who have confirmed that they have received the information have credibly illustrated why the Clinton campaign emails were newsworthy and the Trump campaign emails are not.
Media members often talk about how they feel disrespected by campaigns, politicians, and the public writ large. It’s a consistent theme that I find, personally and professionally, grating. Journalism’s place in society is not ordained. It is earned. Nothing about being a member of the press corps gives you any special status; this is doubly true if you do not respect your readers. Many of the same media figures decry the lack of trust in media by the American public. Again, if you want to be trusted, you need to understand how trust is built. I talk about this with the members of my program all the time. A key in building trust, in any situation, is transparency.
Which brings us back to the quandary in assessing ethical behaviors. I do not actually believe that most journalists are “in the tank” for Trump. It’s true that their corporate masters might be and even some of their editors (looking at you, Times) would prefer he won; but largely I do not think individual members of the media are anxiously awaiting another Trump administration. One can make a charitable assumption that the media ‘learned a lesson’ from 2016. To outsiders though, it becomes increasing hard to extend such charity to them. One can see, for example, how many members of the Press Corps sat on information about events occurring in the WH during the Trump administration (see: both Peter Baker and Trump-Stenographer-in-Chief Maggie Haberman), and ask the very obvious questions about their motivations.
In that framing, it seems more than reasonable to ask them to show their work. If they ‘learned a lesson’ then they should be very transparent about why. They would print their reasoning for not publishing the material and highlight what they had learned. In the absence of such disclosures, we are left to conclude that they are behaving like tabloids and should be treated as such by the general public.
We are made worse by it.