What a difference eight years makes. In 2016, emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee were pilfered and publicized by Russian hackers and the press couldn’t stop writing about it. In 2024, allegedly Iranian hackers infiltrated the Trump campaign’s computers and the three media outlets who were sent the goods declined to publish. 

Depending on one’s politics, this is either an example of a double standard in favor of Republicans or the evolution of the media’s own norms when it comes to publishing hacked materials. But such easy comparisons are not apt. The Trump hack of ’24 and the Clinton hack of ’16 are two very different things. 

To start, the emails Russians stole from the Clinton campaign and the DNC in 2016 were not leaked to a news outlet. They were first published on WikiLeaks and a website created by Russia’s GRU to publicize the material known as DCLeaks. Today the web page displays a warning: “DCLeaks.com was operating as a front for Russian intelligence.” Media outlets that wrote about the hacked Clinton emails were not the gatekeepers for the stolen information. They were playing catch-up with the rest of the internet. 

Furthermore, the hacked material on Clinton contained newsworthy information mixed in with irrelevant personal information about some of the campaign’s staffers.