Media restraint on leak impresses US

WASHINGTON Hours after the dump of hacked emails from the campaign of French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron, a writer with American news site The Daily Beast tweeted admiringly: “Most French media ignoring the hack. See? It can be done. It’s called news judgment.”

In a similar situation in 2016, American media had raced each other to report the daily dump from WikiLeaks of emails and documents obtained allegedly by Russian hackers from the Democratic party’s computer systems and the Clinton campaign, and had breathlessly reported everything from swearing by Hillary Clinton’s campaign official Neera Tandon to election strategies.

That was the comparison The Daily Beast writer, Michael Tomasky, seemed to have been flagging with his tweet that had struck a chord — it has been retweeted more than 3,500 times and collected more than 8,000 likes.

“This is a plea,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci in BuzzFeed, to French media outlets.

“Do not get played the way the US press got played, gullibly falling into the trap set for it. And don’t ignore what happens online. These hacks are merely the stage for the misinformation machine.”

The blackout of the content of the hacked documents was covered widely in US media, and commented upon — sometimes with a trace of self-deprecation, such as this one from The Washington Post: “In the United States, such leaked content would be the stuff of wall-to-wall media coverage.”

And Tanden, a victim of the 2016 US elections hacking, retweeted several posts making the same point.