It's About Ethics in News Journalism

This is a very special issue of All Cats Are Beautiful. It was revealed on Monday that three weeks previously, on July 22, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post received leaked internal emails from the Trump campaign. These emails were apparently obtained via a hack, and the publications decided not to publish them or even mention they had received them. This gave the Trump campaign time to shape the narrative, which they did this week by claiming the emails were the result of an attack by Iranian hackers. Whether or not the hacking was an Iranian state operation, it is possible that without this Trump campaign disclosure the public would never have learned about the leaked emails.

Doing my journalistic duty, I reached out to all three outlets. I asked the Times how they could square withholding these apparently authentic emails with publishing the 'investigation' into Hamas sexual assaults on October 7 that proved to be fully without material evidence and based on the testimony of two known grifters, a now fully debunked report which built the case for Israel's ongoing genocide. Or why they are so comfortable reproducing violent transphobic fearmongering based purely on interviews with a few far right activists but not the actual internal conversations held by such activists.

I did not expect to receive a response at all, never mind such a thoughtful one. But their Deputy Ombudsman, Ariel P. Urson, provided me with this response, which I reproduce in full.

Dear Ms. Osterweil,

It is generally not our policy to discuss editorial decisions or fact-checking processes with the public. However, we cannot agree that our actions demonstrate a pro-Trump bias, never mind a "bootlicker's desire for fascism", and find such accusations offensive.

As a matter of Times policy, editors, writers and staff are disallowed from engaging in political advocacy. This includes within the paper, but also includes activist attempts to publicly challenge the Times' rigorous, fact-based reporting, be it our award-winning coverage of Israel's self-defense against Hamas terrorists or the debate over children's safety after the sudden and you'll admit newsworthy increase of diagnoses of gender dysphoria. We stand behind this reporting with the full weight of our century and a half of journalistic tradition.

As a result, I hope you understand the exceptional nature of the Trump hacks situation. It is important to defend the Times from accusations of impropriety or bias, particularly in actually important political issues such as elections.

To answer your accusations directly: This is not a question of "potentially protecting democracy from a planned and announced fascist coup", as you put it. While this framing is unduly partisan and inflammatory, we also think it is about the wrong question. The question is of ethics in news journalism.

The last decade has seen the objectivity of journalistic establishments threatened from all sides. From the widespread accusations of "fake news" to the hyperbolic claims of social justice activists and the social-media emergence of cancel culture, everywhere the truth is under attack from demagogic forces. We believe this polarization, driven by left and right, is why so many newspapers are struggling to maintain their audiences in these deeply divided times.

This makes our standing firm in our principles and our ethics more important today than ever before. The only way to defend the truth is through the process of Journalism, the kind that doesn't flinch in the face of inconvenient results, that tells people the hard, unvarnished truth, whether or not it's what they want to hear. The pursuit of this ugly and often unpopular truth leads us to have to make difficult decisions in our coverage.

Your comparison to the Hillary Clinton email server scandal lacks context. The truth of the matter was that it was another outlet, the now disgraced Wikileaks, that released the information. Our coverage was of issues already disseminated in the public, and so were of valid public interest.

But the Trump emails we were sent, potentially from enemy-state actors, would have to be released to the public under our say-so. To do it would require verifying the emails' contents, an expensive and difficult process that would have required reassigning resources from vital coverage, such as the four full-time journalists in Butler, PA continuing to uncover every fact they can about the failed assassination attempt of Mr. Trump.

Of course, deploying resources in the search of Truth is what we at the Times do, and we had many discussions with our legal and editorial teams about the possibility of the story. We decided such a publication, despite potential benefit to our organization, would have interfered into the election on behalf of biased and unknown actors, something we could not countenance, even if the veracity of the emails were to be known. The Times will not participate in the violation of intellectual property rights – devotion to the sanctity of the law is why we are bringing a copyright case against the AI industry. Just because something is True doesn't mean it is legal, which is to say, in the public interest.

The Times cannot and will not interfere in the vital democratic processes of this nation. Instead we, will continue to offer unbiased coverage of the many noble struggles faced by Mr. Trump and the often embarrassing missteps of the unseasoned Harris campaign.

You asked us to imagine a world in which the Watergate leaks were never published. While we honor the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein's epoch-defining investigation and reporting, we live in different times. In this era of social media, disinformation and polarization, the issues facing journalists are very different. Technology has changed. To repeat, the press must not interfere with the democratic processes of the nation.

Your claims, made on social media (I can still do a bit of reporting myself) that we are "down harder for Trump than Fox News" because we "crave the ratings boost brought by Trumpian spectacle" are not just vulgar, but disproven by the current situation. If we were purely chasing traffic what would be better than a blockbuster story about leaked Trump emails?

Yet we decided not to publish, because we believe that objectivity, lack of bias, and Truth are the most important values to uphold, especially in these trying and dark times. And whoever wins in November, be it Donald Trump or, against all odds and common sense narratives, Kamala Harris, we will continue to seek out said truth with the integrity and objectivity that our millions of subscribers, Wordle players, NYT Cooking app users and Wirecutter affiliates have come to expect.

Yours,

Ariel P. Urson

Deputy Ombudsman, New York Times