Norms in politics and traditional media have shifted after the last eight years, and hacked information is treated more gingerly, less breathlessly, than it was when the hack helped derail Clinton’s campaign.
And the biggest immediate story here is the apparent, intensifying Iranian effort to defeat Trump, a bigger story than the latest inflammatory JD Vance blog items.
But the hacked material won’t, and shouldn’t be, off limits to journalists. Organizations regularly publish information leaked by sources with questionable motives, including hackers. Last year, in fact, Semafor published detailed revelations about an Iranian government effort to influence American politics, based on apparently hacked documents.
We’ll approach the Trump documents, if they’re publicly available, in a similar way: Not as hot scoops — Politico, notoriously, live-blogged the WikiLeaks revelations — but as information that, if verified, can shed light on important subjects of public interest, but without ignoring their source.
And, of course, news organizations exercise even less control over the public sphere than they did in 2016.
The platform now known as X, controlled by Trump ally Elon Musk, ended its attempts to filter hacked or leaked political material after being widely criticized for attempting to limit access to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included both questions of public interest and sex tapes.
Whatever institutional players do, however, consumers may be more accustomed to hacks and leaks, and more sophisticated about what they mean, than they were in 2016.
— with reporting by Benjy Sarlin
