2024 US Presidential Election

[Fake Messiah]

In 2016, when Clinton campaign emails were leaked, the press ran with them hot and heavy. But today, the same outlets are sitting on a Trump campaign hack. Why?

The coverage wasn’t just high-volume; it was sensationalized. Many outlets focused on cherry-picked quotes taken out of context, fueling controversy and speculation. The constant drip of new information kept the story alive, dominating headlines and shaping the narrative of the campaign’s final weeks.

The press absolutely helped Assange and WikiLeaks achieve his unstated objective of tanking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and elevating Trump to the presidency. There’s really no question about that.

While there were early suspicions of Russian involvement in the hacks, many media outlets initially treated the leaks primarily as a political story rather than a potential act of foreign interference. It wasn’t until after the election that the full scope of Russia’s role in the hacking and distribution of these emails became clear.

Now let’s look to 2024 and examine the alleged hack of the Trump campaign.

In late July and early August of this year, several major news outlets, including Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, received emails from a mysterious figure calling himself “Robert.” This individual offered internal Trump campaign documents, most notably a 271-page dossier listing J.D. Vance’s potential vulnerabilities as a running mate. Unlike in 2016, when similar leaks were quickly published and dissected, these news organizations chose a different approach.

This cautious approach represents a significant shift from 2016. Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post, explained their reasoning: “This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing.”

The decision not to publish the Vance materials seems to have been influenced by their perceived lack of newsworthiness. Murray noted, “In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough.”

This stands in untenable contrast to the way these same outlets responded to the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails in 2016. 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.

If the press wants to do things differently this time around, fine. But if they’re going to do that, then they have a responsibility to both explain the change and make it clear that they botched 2016. It’s as simple as that. If they can’t do that, then I think there’s an obligation to treat this leak the exact same way they treated the 2016 email leak: nonstop negative coverage that played up the very existence of a leak as a scandal in itself. But they won’t.

https://newrepublic.com/article/184916/l...p-campaign