AP (via PBS) is making a story out of the media’s refusal to print the hacked Vance vetting documents and comparing to their rush to print Hillary’s hacked emails in 2016:
News outlets were leaked insider material taken from Trump campaign. They chose not to print it
At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.
Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms.
Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.
(Mediate has the same story: Hacked Trump Campaign Material On JD Vance Leaked to Three Major News Outlets, All of Which Chose Not To Print It, based on the AP report. But the AP story will get wider distribution.)
AP continues:
It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of documents on the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. It was widespread: A BBC story promised “18 revelations from Wikileaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making superb risotto.
David Bauder, the AP reporter, quotes several editors saying they didn’t want to print the material because they hadn’t verified the sources and worried that the Trump campaign might be playing them. He concludes with:
But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested the outlets could have told more than they did. While it’s true that past Vance statements about Trump are easily found publicly, the vetting document could have indicated which statements most concerned the campaign, or revealed things the journalists didn’t know.
Once it is established that the material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they overlearned the lesson of 2016.” [emphasis added]
There is another lesson from 2016 (and later years) that needs to be mentioned here: Nobody threatened the media with violence or with the power of the government when they published the emails — and indeed, spent more time on them than on any other story (Media kept Trump's hack under wraps, but couldn't get enough of Clinton's emails). Trump routinely calls on his supporters to “beat up” the fake media and has made it clear that if he gets back into power he will weaponize the DOJ and the FBI to go after anyone who ever told the truth about him. You would think the media would be working to see that doesn’t happen, just for their own sakes. (FWIW, I do think the MSM is starting to realize that, but slowly and inconsistently.)
Unlike those emails, the Vance vetting process is important to the country. It will show us (and hardly for the first time) just how incompetently Trump goes about picking “only the best people” for his administration. Eisinger was right when he said that the material’s newsworthiness is more important, once it’s been established — and it has — that the material is accurate.
FBI investigating hacking of Trump campaign that led to JD Vance vetting file leak, Iran under scanner
The leaked documents included a research dossier compiled on Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, which appears to be a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.
The 271-page dossier, drawn from publicly available information, highlighted various aspects of Vance’s past, including his previous criticisms of Trump, marked as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The anonymous source claimed to have obtained a range of documents, spanning from legal papers to internal campaign discussions, though the full extent of the data breach remains unclear.
Only three media outlets — Politico, NYT and WaPo — got the documents. So far. I strongly suspect the leaker will deliver them now to some outlet outside the mainstream media which will then publish them, possibly forcing the MSM to start discussing what they got as well. Watch this space.
