When Journalists Align With Thieves

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 17, 2016 at 5:35:23 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] When Journalists Align With Thieves
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> When Journalists Align With Thieves
> The press is mining the dirty work of Russian hackers for gossipy inside-beltway accounts.
> By Steven Levy
> Oct 17 2016
> <https://backchannel.com/when-is-it-ok-to-mine-hacked-emails-1f2081122915>
>
> On June 17, 1972, Washington, D.C. police caught five men breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters at the 
> Watergate hotel-apartment-office complex. “The five men had been dressed in business suits and all had worn Playtex 
> surgical gloves,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein described in their famous book. “Police had seized a walkie-talkie, 
> 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35-millimeter cameras, two lock picks, pen-size tear-gas guns, and bugging devices 
> that apparently were capable of picking up both telephone and room conversations.”
>
> In 2016, Donald Trump did not need to dispatch burglars to loot the Democratic National Committee and use the 
> information to his advantage. He had Gmail, the Russians, WikiLeaks, and the New York Times. In the two major 
> document dumps so far, thousands of private emails that were stolen by hackers and provided to Julian Assange’s 
> organization have been published on the internet for the perusal of all.
>
> First came a serverload of mail from the Committee itself; then more recently, on October 8, came a wholesale 
> delivery of the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s inbox. If the US intelligence agency’s 
> conclusions are to be believed, Vladimir Putin and his government did the hacking, apparently in an attempt to tilt 
> the American election. The perpetrators were counting on the US media to feast on this purloined corpus, sucking the 
> meat from the bones of every email.
>
> Feast they did. Since the leak dropped, the Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications and blogs 
> have been mining the emails for stories. This is perfectly legal. As long as journalists don’t do the stealing 
> themselves, they are solidly allowed to publish what thieves expose, especially if, as in this case, the contents are 
> available to all.
>
> In 1972, journalists helped bring down a president by exposing the theft of political information. In 2016, it’s a 
> presidential campaign urging us to gloss over the source of emails and just report what’s in them, preferably in the 
> most unflattering light. Indeed, it’s not the theft that’s taken center stage, but rather the contents of the emails, 
> as journalists focus on getting maximum mileage by shifting through the loot as if the DNC’s collected ephemera were 
> the Pentagon Papers. And they are not.
>
> Which leads me to wonder: is the exploitation of stolen personal emails a moral act? By diving into this corpus to 
> expose anything unseemly or embarrassing, reporters may be, however unwillingly, participating in a scheme by a 
> foreign power to mess with our election. Still, news is news, and it’s arguably a higher calling than concerns about 
> privacy. (At least that’s what we journalists would argue!) By her refusal to share transcripts of her high-paid 
> speeches to Wall Street firms, Hillary Clinton had already ignited efforts to find out what the heck she said to 
> those fat cats. So it seems, well, seemly, that news organizations would leap at the unfortunate emails in which 
> Podesta and colleagues did the work for journalists by pulling out the most uncomfortable portions of her appearances.
>
> But then came a secondary wave. Taking advantage of WikiLeaks’s easy searchfunction, journalists went deep into the 
> emails. On October 10, the New York Times ran two more stories drawn from the release. One article mined a series of 
> exchangesthat suggested tension between the Clinton campaign and the mayor of New York. The other used the emails to 
> document the not-terribly-earthshattering revelation that the Clinton campaign was having difficulty honing its 
> message.
>
> Both stories were inside-politics subjects that, without the juicy immediacy of information never intended to be 
> public, might have been the kind of dry stories that run deep in the paper. But in this case, the stories wrote 
> themselves because the reporters had emails stolen from Russian hackers. I’m guessing that they got better placement 
> in the paper and more attention online because of the easy scoops.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20161017184917:ECBFD676-94BB-11E6-A730-6A34F010038B
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com