Was WikiLeaks low-hanging fruit for news organizations to act as Kremlin tools? – Washington Post (blog)

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, WikiLeaks enjoyed bragging about the impact of its repeated dumps of emails targeting Hillary Clintons campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee:

President Obama called the medias publication of stories based on those dumps an obsession. Whatever you call it, yes, the U.S. media found the email releases fascinating and newsworthy.

At a Columbia Journalism Review conference today, Columbia Journalism School Professor Todd Gitlin read a question about this whole affair: Did you ever question if the WikiLeaks dump was, in fact, low-hanging fruit for the media to act as a tool for the Kremlin in its mission to disrupt the election?

Washington Post reporter Tom Hamburger replied, Yes.

Asked to elaborate, Hamburger continued, It was expressed in a way quite elegantly in the quote from Scott Shane . . . in which news organizations in publishing these documents, these emails, became de facto agents of the Kremlin. That is correct; the exact words from that New York Times story are as follows: Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and [Hillary Clintons campaign chairman John] Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

More Hamburger: If indeed there was a plan to undermine Hillary Clintons preexisting vulnerabilities because of all the email complaints, other assumptions that had been deeply ingrained from coverage earlier in 2016, WikiLeaks . . . reinforced that message, he said. And news organizations, including mine to the extent we looked at those WikiLeaks and reported on them, ended up reinforcing that theme. . . . We did so, I would say at The Washington Post, aware that we might be dealing with documents that in effect were being provided by a foreign power that didnt wish us well.

Same analysis applies to this blog. We published various stories based on the WikiLeaks dumps, including the revelations that Donna Brazile, a former CNN contributor and high-ranking official at the Democratic National Committee, had passed along questions for town hall and debate events to the Hillary Clinton campaign. We judged those emails and others worthy of coverage.

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Was WikiLeaks low-hanging fruit for news organizations to act as Kremlin tools? - Washington Post (blog)