The Hack Backtrack

“It’s frustrating,” one former Clinton communications official told me Wednesday. “The double standard is frustrating.”

Author

Oliver Darcy
August 14, 2024

Veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign are vexed by what they believe to be a glaring double standard from the news media.

Back in 2016, when Russian hackers obtained campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and provided them to WikiLeaks, the press did not shy away from covering the contents of the messages. Quite the opposite. There were legions of cable news segments, front page stories, and even live blogs with running streams of information as reporters dug through the material in real-time.

Eight years later, however, the news media’s appetite for covering hacked campaign material seems to have waned dramatically. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and POLITICO were all approached with documents taken from Donald Trump’s campaign, but all have declined to publish stories extensively detailing what they said.

“It’s frustrating,” one former Clinton communications official told me Wednesday. “The double standard is frustrating.”

Another former Clinton official, trying to understand the double standard, was more plain spoken: “What the fuck am I missing here?”

To be sure, the cases do not amount to an apples-to-apples comparison. Most notably, Podesta’s emails were dumped online by WikiLeaks for all to see, while the Trump campaign documents have been quietly shopped around. Still, the strategy that news organization’s are adopting is notably different than how they approached the release of hacked documents in 2016. In many ways, it reflects how the press has matured in the way it handles hack-and-leak operations.

“As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish,” a spokesperson for The Post told me.

A POLITICO spokesperson said in a separate statement, “POLITICO editors made a judgment, based on the circumstances as our journalists understood them at the time, that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents.”

None of the outlets have entirely ruled out publishing future material. Instead, they have said the documents they recently were given access to did not meet a high enough bar for them to publish — particularly given the manner in which the material was obtained. It is worth noting, however, that in 2016 news organizations ran reams of stories about plenty of material found in the Podesta emails when much of it was not remotely newsworthy or in the public interest. (Remember his cooking recipes, which received widespread attention from the Washington press corps?)

It’s not that the former Clinton campaign officials believe news organizations should spotlight hacked materials. It’s that, when they protested in 2016, their complaints largely feel on deaf ears. Now, however, it appears the standards have quietly changed without any type of formal mea culpa having been offered by news institutions.

“Do they now admit they were wrong in 2016 or is the rule hacked materials are only used when it hurts Dems?” Neera Tanden, a former Clinton campaign advisor who now works in the Biden administration, wrote on X. “There’s no in between.”

As the former Clinton communications official told me, “To the extent that there is a widespread frustration, the lack of a mea culpa is what is driving people the most nuts.”

Ben Smith, the veteran politics reporter and Semafor editor in chief, told me Wednesday that the former Clinton campaign officials were entirely justified in their frustration. Smith noted that the press “treated the release of [Podesta] documents as a news event” each time it happened and shouldn’t have.

“The Clinton people were tortured and the campaign was derailed by a lot of stuff that was not newsworthy,” Smith said.

Smith added, “The incredible irony is the media did learn its lesson from how unfair it was to the Clinton campaign and the person who benefits from that is Donald Trump.”

SPONSORED CONTENT:

We put your money to work

Betterment’s financial experts and automated investing technology are working behind the scenes to make your money hustle while you do whatever you want.

The Fourth Estate

‘Hot Source’ Goes Cold: Eight months after THR published a splashy story announcing it had poached Lachlan Cartwright from The Daily Beast, the two parties have severed ties. I'm told by people familiar with the matter that management at the Jay Penske-owned trade was simply not happy with Cartwright's volume of output for the Hollywood-oriented publication. Cartwright, an aggressive reporter who built quite the reputation for digging up scoops on the media industry while at The Daily Beast, had been hired in January to launch the "Hot Source" newsletter for the outlet. While word got out on Wednesday, it is unclear when Cartwright and THR officially severed ties. The media reporter has not published a story at the outlet in nearly a month. Cartwright did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. A spokesperson for PMC declined to comment on the personnel matter.

OFF THE WIRE

  • The former police chief who led a widely condemned raid on the Marion County Record was charged with a felony, Ben Brasch, Sofia Andrade, and Anumita Kaur reported. [WaPo]

  • ✂️ Cuts, cuts, cuts: "New York Public Radio, the parent organization of WNYC and Gothamist, will lay off at least 8 percent of its staff next month to try to manage a looming $10 million budget deficit," Nick Pinto reported. [Hell Gate]

  • Yikes. A reporter for a local Wyoming newspaper resigned "after he was caught using generative artificial intelligence to help write his stories, resulting in numerous fabricated quotes," Aimee Ortiz reported. [NYT]

  • NewsNation has new digs on Capitol Hill. Let Kurt Bardella give you a tour! [Threads]

  • Chris Cillizza wrote about the shifting news economy, arguing "journalism isn't dead" yet: "We are now in a moment in which solo journalists (or small groups of journalists) can create a successful (and profitable) business around their work even as mainstream media companies continue to desperately grasp for a working business model." [Cillizza]

  • The NYT will launch its first podcast from Wirecutter. [The Wrap]

  • RIP: "Beccy Barr, who worked as a reporter for Bloomberg Television and CNBC, died at 46 from cancer." [TBN]

The Biz

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

‘All That Zas’: The spotlight continues to remain on Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav — and not in a desirable way. On Wednesday, Variety’s Brian Steinberg and Cynthia Littleton reported on how the chief executive’s "tough tactics have many partners zigging." The duo summed up the state of affairs at the troubled company like this: "Since the start of the year, WBD has been enmeshed in big public battles seemingly of its own making. It has gone to legal war with the NBA. It keeps drawing a hard line with Madison Avenue on upfront ad sales pricing in an era when such tactics are not well received. The reporters at WBD-owned CNN are demoralized. And in the months to come, the company is steeling itself for frosty negotiations with MVPDs that will no doubt push back on audience declines at its cable networks, the likely loss of the NBA and decisions that put good chunks of the company’s linear programming on Max." Read the full story.

► In his latest piece, Puck's William Cohan highlights some of the good news for Zaslav. He notes, for instance, that WBD "has just expanded its streaming offerings globally in the last few months" and is "reaping the rewards of that move." Cohan also contends Zaslav can win back the creative community "with his growing film budgets and personal commitments." But, Cohan still writes, "I have no idea if Zaz will get to the promised land. He’s on the high wire at the moment. I suspect he’s still got the support of John Malone, the WBD director and major stakeholder who is also Zaz’s mentor. Malone is probably advising him to ignore the noise, stay focused on paying down debt, keep creating great content, and maneuver into a position to save some of the other swimmers who are drowning."

THE LEDGER

  • Meanwhile, over at Paramount Global, CBS Sports boss David Berson addressed the not-so-good situation at the Shari Redstone-owned company: "There’s no doubt that the media and entertainment world is incredibly complex these days, but there’s no doubt that the sports world is growing in value every single day." [Deadline]

  • Berson also dismissed the notion that helping Netflix produce its Christmas NFL games is aiding an enemy: "The NFL and Netflix are longstanding partners. We have great relationships with both of them. The fact that we were able to work something out with them and truly have a win-win-win deal is great.” [Deadline]

  • Lionsgate extended chief executive Jon Feltheimer's contract through summer 2029. [THR]

  • 🎙️ The final episode of Vox Media's "Land of the Giants: The Disney Dilemma" dropped, featuring Joe Adalian talk to Richard Plepler, Matthew Ball, Ben Fritz, and others about the streaming wars. [Vulture]

  • The Wrap published the latest entry in a moving series about people unemployed or underemployed in Hollywood: "There really is no security blanket in this industry, even for people who dedicate our whole lives to it." [The Wrap]

  • The Ad Council debuted the latest advertisement in its Emmy Award-winning "Love Has No Labels" campaign on "GMA," which was produced with R/GA. [AdWeek]

The Information Wars

Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

CrowdTangle Crumbles: Rest in peace, CrowdTangle. With less than 90 days until the high-stakes 2024 election, Meta opted to kill the tool that journalists and academics relied on to monitor the platform for mis-and- disinformation. Meta is replacing the tool with another called Meta Content Library. But as NPR's Dara Kerr noted, there are limitations that come with the new tool, with researcher Brandi Geurkink saying it "hardly fill[s] the gaping hole that is left by CrowdTangle’s shutdown." Kerr has more here.

COMBAT ZONE

  • Coming soon: Donald Trump is set to deliver another press conference on Thursday. How will the press — particularly on cable television — cover what is sure to be yet another lie-filled spectacle?

  • Tim Walz agreed to debate J.D. Vance on CBS October 1. [The Wrap]

  • Kamala Harris' campaign said it is making a $90 million August ad buy targeting battleground states. [Deadline]

  • Even Joe Rogan thinks Kamala Harris is knocking it out of the park, admitting she "crushed" her Atlanta speech: "She just crushed it. She crushed it. She had the big moment and she crushed it." [Mediaite]

  • 🤔 Who's the "hall monitor" now? Harris Faulkner pleaded with Big Tech to police Harris' campaign ads and declare them to be "misinformation." [Mediaite]

  • Civil war: Dan Bongino accused Kellyanne Conway of "sabotage" for allegedly leaking to the Daily Mail about Vance. Conway did not respond to a request I put in for comment. [Mediaite]

Masters of the Universe

Google’s offices in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Lowering Google's Gates: The bad news just keeps rolling in for Google. A federal judge said Wednesday that he will order the Silicon Valley titan to open up its app store, a move that comes months after Fortnite-maker Epic Games successful defeated the company in court. Judge James Donato, who also scolded Google in the hearing, bluntly told the search giant, "You shouldn’t have built a fence in the first place." Bloomberg's Rachel Graf and Leah Nylen have the details.

TECH TALK

  • More bad news for Google: The company’s shares closed down a little more than 2% after Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department is weighing breaking up the company. [NYT]

  • On the marketing front, Google Android boss conceded to The WSJ's Joanna Stern that the company's widely panned Olympics A.I. spot was not its best: "I think maybe we missed the mark with it." [YouTube]

  • Ina Fried wrote about how the chatbot wars are getting personal as companies “combine the generic knowledge of a large language model with a user's personal data.” [Axios]

  • Happy wife, happy life? Mark Zuckerberg's decision to commission a giant statue of his wife in keeping with "the Roman tradition" has prompted all sorts of reactions. [The Guardian]

The Closing Number

“Alien: Romulus” hits theaters this weekend. (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

Raving Over 'Romulus': The reviews are rolling in — and the critics really seem to like "Alien: Romulus." As of Wednesday evening, with 99 reviews in, the R-rated sci-fi horror boasted a strong 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Honoring its nightmarish predecessors while chestbursting at the seams with new frights of its own, Romulus injects some fresh acid blood into one of cinema's great horror franchises," the RT critics consensus read. RT has a roundup here.

FINAL BOW

  • Usher postponed the opening of his tour, saying he needs to give his body "time to rest and heal." It's unclear specifically what injury he needs time to heal from. [Variety]

  • Kim Kardashian signed a first-look deal with 20th Television. [Deadline]

  • Paramount has struck a licensing deal with Disney that will see "Family Guy" air on Comedy Central. [Deadline]

  • Demi Lovato spoke to Lacey Rose about making her directorial debut with "Child Star." [THR]

  • "Twisters" is now available to rent/buy on digital. [Variety]

  • He's back! "LOST" star Matthew Fox will star in Max's drama series, "The Assassin," Matt Grobar reports. [Deadline]

  • Charlie Cox said Marvel boss Kevin Feige called him in 2020 about reprising the "Daredevil" role — and then he apparently didn't hear back for two years. [Variety]

  • Netflix renewed Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" for a second season. [Variety]

  • FX dropped the trailer for "American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez." [YouTube]