Donald Trump’s presidential campaign announced it had been hacked on Friday following a report that Iranian hackers tried to illegally access a campaign official’s account. On Saturday, The Washington Post and Politico reported that they had received unsolicited emails from an anonymous source who purportedly got ahold of Trump campaign documents—and both outlets held off on publishing anything about that until the Trump campaign confirmed it.
And with that, the story has largely faded. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico’s Monday front pages don’t even mention it.
Compare this scenario to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when “But her emails” wasn’t just a meme, but the Beltway media’s raison d’être.
Clinton’s private email server and the Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails were making headlines on a daily basis. Enough so that the Columbia Journalism Review, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School analyzed the coverage.
Their conclusion: The Clinton email controversy received more coverage in traditional media outlets than any other topic during the 2016 presidential election.
According to Columbia Journalism Review’s analysis, “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta).”
Beyond The New York Times’ coverage, CJR found that “the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.”
Back in 2016, Politico maintained a daily liveblog reporting “the latest Wikileaks dump of emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.”
For now, it seems like Trump’s email hack seems to have come and gone, with the exception of the news that the FBI is investigating it. Both the Post and Politico sat on the story until the Trump campaign confirmed it, and no reporters have published excerpts from the documents they received.
What a difference a candidate makes.
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