On Hacked Documents, Journalism and the Motives of Sources

Highlighting a weakness in much of day-to-day coverage

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

The news that Iranian hackers apparently penetrated computers at the Trump campaign—ironically through a phishing maneuver ensnaring convicted (and Trump-pardoned) felon Roger Stone— prompted a flood of ruminations about how journalists should handle hacked information they’ve been given.

I don’t think the bigger questions here are that hard. You need to authenticate every document (it’s, for instance, long been occasional Russian practice to salt phony documents in with real ones when leaking them). Then you publish only what’s newsworthy, not what’s merely interesting. When I was at ProPublica, editor-in-chief Steve Engelberg and I laid out how this logic applied in the case of tax information from the IRS and corporate files from Sony via North Korea.

In the tax files case, we didn’t know where the information came from, although we did describe what the source had told us about why they had given it to us. But when you do know the source—as with the Clinton file leaks from the Russians via Wikileaks in 2016 and now apparently from the Iranians—a third rule comes into play: you should fulsomely tell readers about the motives of your sources.

Now for the hard part

It's this last element on which I want to focus this week, not so much with respect to the Trump files, but because I think this discussion reveals a weakness in too much of our day-to-day journalism. That’s because placing a scoop in the context of the motivations of your sources is something I think we don’t do nearly often enough.

Hostile foreign powers, of course, aren’t the only people who leak documents. In fact, they are responsible for an infinitesimally small proportion of leaks. But many if not most leakers have motives beyond informing the public, and those motives are often known to the reporters receiving the leaks.

Who is he? Why did he do it?

It would, thus, be a service to readers to say that your leak comes from, for instance, sources in a campaign who are frustrated that the candidate is not taking their advice, or from staffers for alternative contenders for a job that’s up for grabs, or from a minority faction of officials in an agency, or from any number of longtime opponents of a particular official or candidate. These are the sorts of reasons people leak things—and have been for many decades.

Yet, you very rarely see such attribution in stories that, often breathlessly, bring you the leaked info.

Why it happens

I try not to be naïve about this. I know why the context of source motivation is often missing. Sometimes sources insist on it in exchange for an exclusive—although reporters should push back harder against this than many often do. Sometimes reporters and editors are so enchanted by their scoop that they hesitate to undermine it, even just a bit, by indicating the self-interest behind it (other, of course, than their own). Sometimes there is a hope that protecting not only the identity of the source but also their motivation will facilitate more leaks down the road.

But readers, I would argue, frequently know better. Even if they are what many in newsrooms call “civilians,” they understand, perhaps vaguely, that news sources are rarely altruistic. And when the news they read fails to acknowledge this, they lose one more little bit of trust, contributing to an epidemic of mistrust that has long been growing.

Beyond revealing more about source motivations in order to rebuild trust, we should also do it simply because it’s right. Where news comes from is a critical piece of context, and this is no less true when the source seeks to remain obscure than when they push to get their name or brand in an announcement story.

The restraint displayed so far in handling the Trump hack suggests to me that when stories about fruits of that hacking finally do appear— and I think they likely will— you will hear about the Iranians in those same stories, as you should. Let’s hope that similar context also starts to appear more often in scoops more conventionally obtained.