Hacking offers a lesson for the media
THE hacked emails from Emmanuel Macron’s French campaign appear to be spectacularly mundane, according to people who have read them. They include briefings on issues, personal exchanges and discussions of the weather. No doubt they also include some embarrassing thoughts, but so far they are notably lacking in scandal. Does this remind you of anything? Last year, Russian agents stole thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and published them via WikiLeaks. The dominant feature of the emails was their ordinariness.
They contained no evidence of lawbreaking, major hypocrisy or tawdry scandal. Even the worst revelation – a Democratic official and CNN contribu- tor fed a town hall question to the campaign in advance – qualified as small beer. The Clinton emails were instead full of staff members jockeying for position, agonising over strategy and offering advice to bosses.
Despite the mundane quality of the Clinton emails, the media covered them as a profound revelation. But this was no scoop. It was material stolen by a hostile foreign government posted for all to see, and it was only occasionally revealing.
With a president who lies all the time, journalism becomes all the more important. The hyped coverage of the hacked emails was the media’s worst mistake in 2016 – one sure to be repeated if not properly understood. The sensationalism exacerbated a second problem with the coverage: the obsession with Clinton’s private email server.
I disagree with people who say the server was a nonstory. Clinton violated government policy and was not fully honest. The FBI investiged. All of that adds up to a real news story. The question is scale.
Last weekend, France’s mainstream media showed how to exercise better judgment. Late on Friday, two days before the election, hackers released the Macron campaign emails. Publica- tions could have reported on the substance of the emails, but they largely did not. “It was a manipulation attempt – people trying to manipulate our voting process,” said Gilles van Kote, deputy chief editor of Le Monde.
French journalists evaluated what truly was major news. Material released by a hostile foreign government, with the aim of confusing voters and evidently without significant information, failed to qualify.
The two cases obviously are not identical. But they are similar enough to say that the French media exercised better, more sober judgment than the American media.
The media should not pretend that the only two options are neglect and sensationalism. There is a middle ground, one where journalistic judgment should prioritise news over the whiff of news.