Double Standard?

Created
Tue, 24/09/2024 - 03:30
Updated
Tue, 24/09/2024 - 03:30
You betcha In her newsletter today, Margaret Sullivan discusses the astonishing fact that media organizations are sitting on a trove of hacked emails from the Trump campaign and refusing to publish them, in stark contrast to their behavior in 2016 when they eagerly pounced on similarly hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. She asks herself, what if it these were hacked emails from the Biden or Harris campaign. Would they be similarly protected? A group of well-known journalists got together last week to kick this topic around at the behest of Steve Adler, the former top editor of Reuters who now runs an ethics initiative at NYU. Adler moderated a panel including Ben Smith of Semafor who — when he was the editor of BuzzFeed News — famously published the so-called Steele dossier. That dossier was full of unverified and in some cases salacious information about Trump, much of which has turned out to be untrue. The other panelists were Sewell Chan, the new editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Kathleen Carroll, the former executive editor of the Associated Press. These media bigwigs agreed, in general, that the standard for publication of hacked information has to be true newsworthiness. In other words, does the public need to know what’s in documents that come from such a tainted source? Smith, though, said he has a strong (and, I would add, well-proven) tendency to go ahead and publish, reasoning that the press shouldn’t be in the business of keeping secrets. Maybe the…