Three news outlets were recently leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign, but have chosen not to reveal any of the details about what they received.
    • MehBlah@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      Just look at who they are owned by. People just as weird as he is. Not the good weird though. The nasty kind.

    • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Or they didn’t want to give him persecution fodder so he can say the election is invalid because he was hacked

      Oh wait… He is already saying that

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        That’s a high-school level analysis.

        The reality is that the media companies are small parts of much larger organizations that will benefit from Trump’s impact on worker rights, taxation, home ownership, environmental regulation, and more.

        If Fox News team at a net loss of 2000%, it would still be worth it to Murdoch.

        NBC is owned by Comcast, whose major shakers include JP Morgan, Vanguard, and more.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    For everyone complaining about these not being published: This is why Wikileaks was a net good.

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Wikileaks selectively leaked material helping Trump get elected giving us the mess we are in now. So I beg to differ.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Well, that’s a bit of a misrepresentation; they published documents that hurt Hillary Clinton while declining to publish documents from the Russian government. But even if they had published both sets of documents, the effect on the election would have been the same. It’s not as though they declined to publish documents on Trump. Either way, if you’re opposed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails being leaked, I have to assume that you’re equally opposed to the Trump campaign’s emails being leaked, and you’re glad that these news outlets are not releasing the information.

        • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          No, you made a pretty big assumption. I dont care that Hillarys emails were leaked and I would have liked Trumps emails to be leaked aswell.

          My biggest issue with wikileaks was that they exposed the names of people spying for the US in enemy countries which put their lives in danger. All while censoring the names of Russian operatives in the Russian leaks.

          • pjwestin@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            OK, but that’s not what you said. You said that, “Wikileaks selectively leaked material helping Trump get elected giving us the mess we are in now.” So if you weren’t complaining about the Podesta emails, what were you referring to that helped Trump get elected?

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I think we can agree that having an unbiased publisher who is willing to report on state secrets that can negatively affect society is truly important. I think the debate is whether what WikiLeaks morphed into over the years qualifies as that.

      Post 2016, I think it would be hard to argue that WikiLeaks is anything but a propaganda arm of certain state governments.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You could also argue that being indicted by the Justice Department in 2012 forced Assange to seek the favor of governments who weren’t aligned with U.S. interests. It’s certainly a betrayal of Wikileaks founding principles that it passed in those Russian documents in 2017, but if I were already the target of the U.S. government, I probably wouldn’t want to piss off the Russian government as well. But again, that’s why I said it was a net positive, not a positive.

        Also, please don’t take my defense of Assange against the U.S. government as a defense of Assange as a man. Just because I didn’t want to see him in a U.S. prison, doesn’t mean I didn’t want to see him in a Swedish prison.

        • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
          0·
          3 months ago

          You could also argue that being indicted by the Justice Department in 2012 forced Assange to seek the favor of governments who weren’t aligned with U.S. interests. It’s certainly a betrayal of Wikileaks founding principles that it passed in those Russian documents in 2017, but if I were already the target of the U.S. government, I probably wouldn’t want to piss off the Russian government as well.

          That’s a fair point, however I would like to point out that being indicted by the government you’re leaking information against is a foreseeable conclusion. The thing that made WikiLeaks credible to begin with was their founding principles, abandoning those principles is also abandoning your credibility.

          Also, please don’t take my defense of Assange against the U.S. government as a defense of Assange as a man. Just because I didn’t want to see him in a U.S. prison, doesn’t mean I didn’t want to see him in a Swedish prison.

          I’m in the same boat, I don’t think anyone should go to jail for journalism. However, Assange towards his later years in the embassy had definitely been engaging in actions I would be hard pressed to label as journalism.

          I still don’t think he should be in jail, but if he were still running WikiLeaks today I don’t know if it would still be a net positive. That’s depending on your geopolitical outlook though.

          • pjwestin@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            That’s a fair point, however I would like to point out that being indicted by the government you’re leaking information against is a foreseeable conclusion.

            Well, that’s the thing, though; Wikileaks actually never leaked anything, they just published the leaks. When the Gaurdian published the Snowden leaks, Snowden immediately became a target of prosecution, but the journalists who worked on the story were never prosecuted. Even as hostile as the Obama administration was towards the press, they wouldn’t dare prosecute journalists for publishing a story. But it wasn’t just Chelsea Manning that they went after for the 2010 Afghan War leaks, it was Assange and Wikileaks itself. You can argue it was because they weren’t a traditional press group, but realistically, it was because the government could get away with it.

            Assange personally has always seemed like a piece of shit, and politically, he has definitely gone off the deep end in the last 8 years or so, but then again, 7 years a single embassy room followed by 5 years in prison is probably going to mess with your brain. I wish Wikileaks had moved on without him, and I agree that he wasn’t operating from a neutral position anymore, but without a replacement emerging, I think we’d be better off having it than having nothing.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      They can only be a net good if they publish without editorial comment and without discrimination.

      But that also runs the risk of becoming the world clearinghouse for faked documents and such.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    3 months ago

    By not printing any of it, they just create a talking point that there was nothing embarrassing to print. Thanks. That really helps us. Assholes.

    • kylie_kraft@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      The asshole actively aided the 2016 Trump campaign by releasing Hillary’s emails while refusing to release anything damaging to Republicans. What makes you think that he wouldn’t keep being a Russian puppet now?

        • ggppjj@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Without the shared subtext of visible or audible tone, the text you write is the text we read.

        • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          Poe’s Law is a law of the internet for a reason. Unless you indicate tone text alone can easily be mistaken for genuine opinion.

          • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            I think a lot of our rise of extremism is that on places like 4chan and 8chan the people who were being sarcastic and the people that weren’t assumed the people they were interacting with were in the same headspace they were, and further, as time went on the two positions became blended.

            • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
              0·
              3 months ago

              Poes law in name has been around for about as long as 4chan, but Nathan Poe was making an observation based on a Christian forum in a debate on creationism and before Poe made his observation and became the name of the law, Jerry Schwartz posted advising against using sarcasm unless you put something marking it as satire on Usenet in 1983. This effect was known well before 4chan, dating back to the days of Usenet.

              If you don’t say you’re joking on the internet, someone will take something at face value without getting the joke.

        • mad_asshatter@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          I didn’t do the /s as an experiment.

          tsk, tsk, tsk.

          Are you NEW here?

          lemmy rule #1.aaaa+

          include ‘/s’ lest ye be dogpiled to oblivion

          oh, /s

  • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
    0·
    3 months ago

    Trump is financially advantageous. Our current economic model incentivizes outrage because it fuels engagement.

    Trump is a money maker. That is why he is constantly in the spotlight. People are drawn to oddities and weirdos so they take full advantage and keep him in the spotlight by any means necessary. They won’t retire him until he’s dead. And even then, who knows.

  • Beryl@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    With Trump and the current GOP, the corruption is in plain sight anyway. At this stage, you could dig up a thousand more incriminating dossiers and it still wouldn’t move the needle for the MAGhats.

    • Rapidcreek@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      It’s more probable that the DOJ told them to STFU, and their lawyers thought that was a good idea.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        I haven’t read anything reporting that. Do you have some news source that I don’t? Also, they would have been complete fools to ask the feds when they don’t need the feds’ permission to publish things.

        • Rapidcreek@lemmy.worldOP
          0·
          3 months ago

          So why would the DOJ tell them to keep quiet?

          Because, when the FBI investigates a crime, in this case a computer crime, they advise the witness, in this case the media, to keep everything confidential. They do this to not compromise their investigation.

          And, media lawyers know that the use of stolen material exposes them to charges and law suits.

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            That didn’t seem to matter to them much in previous incidents.

            These were leaked, it says they may have come from a hack, so the “crime” portion is even less defined than the previous releases like Clinton’s, which absolutely came from a hack but nobody seemed to care.

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          And why would self respecting journalists listen to them about this? Journalists aren’t supposed to let themselves just get strong armed by governments who don’t want them talking about certain things.

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            I think real journalists are in incredibly short supply, along with agencies willing to print what should be said. Think of all the ridiculous titles, pointless exaggeration, opinion, clickbait, and all the rest in popular media. Couple that with right wing billionaire media owners and getting the unvarnished truth becomes the exception and not the rule.

        • pjwestin@lemmy.world
          0·
          3 months ago

          Literally none of the emails you just referenced were released by media outlets.

          From the first link: “A previously secret trove of emails released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee…”

          From the second link: “The Florida Supreme Court ordered the release of 528 pages of emails sent between partisan political consultants and state officials…”

          From the third link: “The email exchange between GSA officials and Harrison is one of more than 100 pages of emails and documents newly released by the GSA…”

          The Clinton campaign emails were also published by Wikileaks. Once they were published, the media reported on them, but they had no hand in releasing them.

  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    “At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign […] So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.”

    I kind of got the impression that AP was indicating they wouldn’t keep silent (after verifying the materials).

    The discussion in the comments here is illuminating, though. I knew Wikileaks was a Russian mouthpiece, but I didn’t realize the website offered cover for reporting of other news agencies, so they could avoid legal liability for releasing things.
    Would not be surprised if a random site spun up somewhere with these documents on them soon.

  • x4740N@lemm.ee
    0·
    3 months ago

    It’s time the leakers start releasing this information on the open Web if it the journalists don’t publish it

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Huh. The same ButterEmailz corporate media put their thumb on the scales, again?

    Weird. I keep hearing about this alleged “liberal media”. Just where in the fuck is this supposed liberal media, anyway?

  • Warjac@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    Well duh, you think the major media companies that own like 99% of all local news stations and constantly run fear mongering stories and give Republicans soft ball questions and a platform to speak on are really going to leak into against Trump?

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      Nobody has confirmed it was Iran. That was a statement from the Trump Campaign that got put into headlines without qualification.