Russia has weaponized the American press

There’s strong evidence that Russia is hacking Hillary Clinton’s allies and handing the private information it steals to WikiLeaks, which promptly makes it public. The goal is to interfere with the US election to help Donald Trump win the presidency or simply to sow chaos that causes Americans to doubt the results.

What hasn’t been talked about is that Vladimir Putin has an unwitting ally: the American media, which is helping him accomplish that very task.

It’s not enough for WikiLeaks to publish hacked emails. Very few ordinary people actually go through raw data dumps. You need media outlets with wide readerships to disseminate the hacked information and to put politically damaging quotes from and about Clinton into newspaper articles and television broadcasts that reach tens of millions of people. If Russia succeeds in disrupting the US election, then it will have only done so because it had the press as its partner.

“It’s not just getting the information; it’s getting it distributed and disseminated widely,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, explains. “One thing I think is important is for press institutions to recognize when they’re being used.”

This isn’t happening because the American press is pro-Russian. Far from it. Russia is instead playing on the press’s incentives, making it so that the US press has little choice but to go along with its plan.

WikiLeaks revealed Democratic National Committee officials plotting to undermine Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, revelations that ultimately forced DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. Emails stolen from Clinton adviser John Podesta, and published by WikiLeaks, revealed excerpts from Clinton’s closed-door speeches to big banks, a subject of major controversy in the Democratic primary. In one of those excerpts, which Donald Trump seized on almost immediately, Clinton talked about needing “both a public and a private position” on key policy issues.

These are big-deal news items, and no news organization could afford to ignore them. We at Vox, for example, covered both the DNC and Podesta emails extensively — and would have been remiss not to.

This is how Russia gets us. Once WikiLeaks publishes a trove of newsworthy emails, the press is stuck in a corner: Doing its job will help a hostile foreign power manipulate the American election and arguably even help weaken faith in the press itself.

And that’s why Putin’s plan is so devilish: He’s undermining the credibility of two key American institutions in one go.

How the press is being weaponized

(Carl Court/Getty Images)

Countries increasingly hack other governments and foreign companies. North Korea, a technological backwater, appears to have hacked Sony Pictures’ emails in 2014 as retaliation for making a movie that mocked Kim Jong Un. The information was leaked out in dribbles and, eventually, dumped to WikiLeaks.

The celebrity gossip in the emails deeply embarrassed the company’s leadership; even worse were some emails from top executives making racist comments about President Obama. The consequences for the rank-and-file employees were pretty bad, too. More than half of Sony Pictures’ staff had their Social Security numbers dumped online.

Both the Sony Pictures hack and the recent Democratic hacks worked by exploiting a key feature of democratic countries: a free and open press. The US could hack Putin’s email and release some embarrassing details to the American media, but the strongman could easily prevent the Russian press from publishing any of it.

Putin doesn’t have a similar problem with the anti-Clinton information. When you hand over stolen information that’s damaging to Hillary Clinton to a radical transparency group that detests Hillary Clinton (because of her relatively hawkish foreign policy), the result is eminently predictable: That information will be published online for the entire world to see.

At that point, journalists really don’t have any option but to cover the disclosures.

Journalists can’t just ignore information that’s in the public interest because the source might be shady. If it’s important, true, and valuable for the public to know, then journalists really should be covering it. That’s why the New York Times, which resisted publishing information from hacked Sony emails in 2014, ended up covering them once they were made public.

“Is it possible to dismiss the fact that these emails have such tremendous news value? Absolutely not,” Lonnie Isabel, a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, says of the recent Clinton disclosure. “A lot of the decisions that are made for us in the digital age are made simply by disclosure.”

There’s also a competition issue. Once WikiLeaks publishes a big document dump, journalistic organizations have to assume that their rivals will cover them too. Nobody wants to be scooped by their competition on something big, so everyone has an incentive to comb through the disclosures and publish whatever they find that they deem newsworthy.

Even after one outfit finds an email, others have a strong incentive to aggregate their discoveries — writing pieces, like the one my colleague Matt Yglesias did on the Clinton speech revelations, explaining or analyzing the newly reported information.

The result, then, is that everything about the profession of journalism inclines reporters to report on the contents of the hacked emails. This is right and good, and exactly what journalists should be doing.

Except that in this case, the normal functioning of journalism is objectively damaging American democracy.

Why the Russian plan is so dangerous for democracy

(Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP/Getty Images and Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

One of the scariest recent developments in the US election has been Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the election itself. As Trump’s poll numbers have fallen, he has begun warning regularly of dark conspiracies, from unnamed conspirators, aimed at thieving the election from him.

“So important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” Trump said at one mid-October rally. “We do not want this election stolen.”

This type of talk is a serious threat to America’s open political system. Political scientists who study democratic decline believe that for the system to keep functioning, everybody needs to accept the legitimacy of the basic electoral process, so losers concede once the vote totals come in.

Trump has thrown that into doubt, increasing the likelihood of post-election violence or mass unrest on the part of those who don’t believe the result was legitimate.

“By talking preemptively about a ‘rigged system’ that may well lead to a ‘stolen election,’ Donald Trump is weakening his voters’ faith in elections in a way that could prove extremely dangerous,” Shane Bowler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, writes in an essay for Vox.

The press coverage of the WikiLeaks disclosure only fuels that sentiment.

The more we find out about secret actions by the campaign, released only because hackers and WikiLeaks took some initiative, the more it seems like US politics really is a dark conspiracy.

The disclosures bring to light information that makes it seem like the process is fundamentally illegitimate. The emails usually show normal behind-the-scenes maneuvering and activity. Examples include Neera Tanden, head of the ideologically friendly Center for American Progress, emailing the Clinton campaign to talk about coordinating a Supreme Court message, and the full transcripts of three Clinton speeches to Goldman Sachs.

There's nothing illegal or improper in the emails or speeches, but given the sheen of secret information and cynical interpretations from Clinton opponents, it comes across as a secret conspiracy to a lot of Trump supporters.

The press, by signal-boosting these disclosures, makes these accusations more credible to voters who don’t really understand that these disclosures, however problematic, don’t bear on the fundamental fairness of the November election. They just see plotting and conspiracy.

This appears to be one of Russia’s main goals here: to embarrass the United States and undermine the legitimacy of democracy as a system of government. Putin is personally paranoid about the risk of a revolution at home, and wants to limit the US’s ability to check his ambitions abroad. Weakening and embarrassing America’s political system kills both birds with the same stone.

“A primary objective of Russian actions here is to delegitimize the democratic processes of the United States,” Herb Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, tells me.

There’s a kind of symbiotic relationship with Trump here. Trump says the election is rigged. Trump reads reporting on the WikiLeaks disclosures because they make Clinton look bad — he has literally said “I love WikiLeaks” on the stump. He then cites the disclosures as proof that Clinton is fundamentally corrupt, and only a corrupt system could elect her.

Reporting on this leaked information, however well-intentioned, is helping Trump and Putin cast doubt on the system.

“There’s only one candidate right now that’s complaining about American democracy,” Lin says. “The most important thing to do is to repudiate the sentiment that the election is gonna be rigged.”

Reporters are hurting themselves — and it’s hard for them to stop

(Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images)

Russia’s strategy is even more dangerous that it appears. Not only does it undermine democracy using the press but it actually gets the press to undermine itself. And there’s not much we can reasonably do about it, either.

Every cybersecurity researcher I spoke to warned that the next step in Russia’s strategy is forgeries: that the Russians will give WikiLeaks a lot of hacked information and include in it some fake emails with seemingly damning information. Because this is private correspondence, it’s very difficult for reporters to identify as being false. The people who are hacked can deny it, but WikiLeaks will insist it’s genuine, creating a kind of “he said, she said” situation where you can’t really know who’s telling the truth.

There’s no evidence Russia has done this in any of the election dumps — yet. But it has before: Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll has a good write-up of how documents stolen from philanthropist George Soros’s foundation included one note showing Soros’s group shoveling hundreds of thousands of dollars to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The email was a fake, one designed to discredit Navalny by making him look like a foreign plant.

The Soros email was a poor forgery and was easily caught. But there’s no guarantee the Kremlin remains this incompetent in the future.

That’s what’s so scary for the press. If future docu-dumps contain potentially falsified information, which can’t well be verified, we end up in a post-truth world where it’s impossible to trust information online. The press may end up unintentionally propagating false information, even if it reports denials by the targets alongside the fake revelations. That undermines its role as societal truth teller and thus the public’s already damaged faith in the press’s honesty.

“Hacking and misinformation are the death knell,” Isabel, the journalism professor, says. “If we’re just constantly following and repeating information we get, then our credibility goes even lower.”

The worst part, though, is that there’s almost no way for the press to stop this. Reporters, for reasons we’ve discussed, have every reason to report on hacked disclosures. We can’t hold back on newsworthy information because of the hypothetical fear that one day Russia will end up spinning us into undermining ourselves.

There are checks the press can put up, of course: Be skeptical, don’t report things that seem mundane or too outlandish, verify with independent information whenever you can, and publish other pieces on Russia’s information warfare strategy. But it’s not at all clear that these tactics can counteract the damage hacking and misinformation can do to the credibility of both democracy and the press itself.

The only real, durable solution is to get Russia to knock it off: to somehow persuade the Russians to stop hacking American political actors and dumping their information to WikiLeaks. And that’s just not something the press is equipped to do.