A New York Times Reporter Is Making a Stunning Admission That She Became an ’Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence’ | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/new-york-times-reporter-making-stunning-admission-she-became-unwitting-age
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s just-released memoir, Chasing Hillary, offers a detailed and direct admission that major media outlets played into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands by devoting obsessive coverage to hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s a striking acknowledgment, given how defensive the Times and its campaign journalists have generally been about their work. But rather than writing off Chozick’s mea culpa as proof of personal weakness or a one-off error, journalists should take it as a warning. The 2016 election may have been the first time that journalists found themselves the tools of a foreign government aimed at undermining American democracy. It won’t be the last.
"If you get email correspondence of newsworthiness from any source, you have an obligation to publish it, assuming it’s true, which in this case it was. You have an obligation to publish it,” Baquet said on NPR. “And if a powerful figure writes emails that are newsworthy, you’ve just got to publish them.”
Baquet presents a false choice between hiding vital information from the public and behaving exactly as media outlets did during the 2016 election — one that seems to appeal to other Times political reporters. This formulation ignores a third option — that the failure wasn’t that news outlets had published emails stolen by a hostile source, but that the scope of their coverage greatly exceeded the actual news value of the emails. The hacked email coverage is one of a series of cases in which poor editorial judgment led to an overwhelming focus on Clinton email-related purported scandals instead of pressing policy issues.