If journalists in 2016 were rendered “puppets” by politically motivated foreign hackers and their dissemination of weaponized information, reporters and editors need to convene now to make sure those same strings aren’t pulled in the 2018 midterms. Where standards and practices need to be updated to protect American democracy, those charged with implementing the First Amendment daily need to come together and ask difficult questions.
These questions are being asked elsewhere in the political environment, but less so within the media itself. As Natasha Bertrand noted in The Atlantic last week, the two political parties are at least engaged in talking about whether or not they will leverage incriminating and ill-gotten information in their campaigns this fall. Democrats are publicly claiming they won’t make use of information acquired through foreign hackers’ intervention, while the Republicans have yet to offer a position on the issue. (This despite Sen. Marco Rubio’s prescient stance in 2016 against capitalizing on leaks “Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us.”) Similarly, the federal government is having public hearings taking on privacy and cybersecurity from myriad angles, to air concerns and determine a future course.
We can argue the parties’ positions at a later date, but at least they get partial credit for having it on their radar. The same goes for Congress. My aim here is to ask how much brain power and energy is being invested by the mainstream media so that 2016 doesn’t repeat itself.
While I presume that these conversations are being had internally, whether in boardrooms or on barstools, it would be very illuminating and educational for the public if the contours of these talks were shared publicly.
It’s clear that there is consensus among high-profile reporters that this is an issue.
Amy Chozick’s controversial memoir of covering Hillary Clinton’s presidential run has been fueling bipartisan anger because of her informal definition of non-fiction. But the less-reported, more long-term crisis she acknowledges? Her role, and that of numerous political reporters nationwide, as being so driven by deadlines and bylines in covering the Wikileaks information of internal emails from the Clinton campaign that a larger debate of the agenda and purpose behind that leaked information was not had. And because this deliberation was not undergone, even within the newspaper of record in the United States, American reporters and their readers were taken for a ride.
Pardon me this extended excerpt from Chozick’s recent mea culpa in the New York Times:
In December, after the election, my colleagues in Washington wrote a Pulitzer-winning article about how the Russians had pulled off the perfect hack. I was on the F train on my way to the newsroom when I read it. I had no new assignment yet and still existed in a kind of postelection fog that took months to lift. I must’ve read this line 15 times: “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.
This is an incredibly dangerous vulnerability that the Russians exposed and manipulated; more dangerous is the fact that no corrective measures or new thinking has been infused into the media’s work to date.
For those of you keeping score at home:
- Journalists are admitting that they were not quite circumspect when it came to using information acquired via a major hack in 2016. (Whether this decided the election is an exercise for political scientists and partisans.)
- There seems to be something close to unanimity that this scenario remains extremely possible, if not outright likely, for the upcoming mid-terms.
- There is hand-wringing and some media navel-gazing, but no movement towards any updated consideration of the ‘rules of engagement’ when it comes to information.
- All bets are off for us and all systems are go for a foreign nation or bad actor who wants to pollute the political conversation. Or, as cybersecurity reporter Naomi Eide noted via Twitter in April:
When the leaker is the nation state, what do you do with that information? Should you report the content if it’s North Korea? End of the day: journalists covering cybersecurity have some difficult ethical decisions to make. #RSAC #RSAC2018
— Naomi Eide (@NaomiEide) April 19, 2018
Clearly it’s not just cybersecurity reporters, it’s any reporter whose coverage could be informed by cybercriminals. It’s the largest unanswered question looming over the 2018 elections: What should political or national reporters do when presented with information leaked by rogue agents?
There are no simple answers here, just complicated questions for a reporters, editors and management:
- What will you do if you receive information from a source that you believe to be a foreign agent?
- What if that person is one degree of separation from a foreign government or agent?
- How will you determine what is information that can be used and reported on, and what is agitprop? (Even if the information is likely true)
- Is there a government body that you should share this information with?
- What will you do when the news is reported by a media outlet of less firm principles?
And the overarching question facing major media:
- Will enough of you all sign on to shared “rules of engagement” where you agree to not report and disseminate information hacked into by a foreign nation state?
- When and if a story or leaked discovery is reported on via other media or over social media, will this media alliance communicate to the public the problems they have with it, and dilute its power?
At the end of the day, this threat poses a tremendous opportunity for the press to demonstrate in real-time stories with the highest stakes the standards they believe in and the vigilance they abide by everyday. But only so far as the conversation is had among media outlets and decisions are made.
Journalism is under siege right now, whether from the highest office in the country or any Twitter use throwing “Fake News” grenades. If the media were to demonstrate how it serves as a firewall against false claims and foreign influence, and that it can learn how to right itself where it has erred, it would be good for the nation and good for the industry at a time when both could use it.
Matthew Felling (@matthewfelling) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former print/TV/radio journalist, media critic, and U.S. Senate communications director, now serving as a public affairs and crisis consultant with Burson-Marsteller in Washington.
