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If a "credible" (read: state-approved) news organization had released those emails, would you have the same thoughts toward them?

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Why would a "credible" news organization have released them?

They weren't released to show evidence of any particular wrongdoing, nor did they show any illegal activity. They were simply dumped in order to fuel the fire of the impression of wrongdoing, and in hopes that some smoking gun or salacious material could be found to use against her politically.

Would you support it if the DNC had run a similar campaign supporting Clinton against Obama in 08?

The purpose of the DNC, as with the RNC, is to choose a candidate they feel is most likely to win. I don't believe choosing Obama over Clinton would have been any less political than choosing Clinton over Obama, or Clinton over Bernie. I don't believe that political calculus or meddling or special privileges granted to high-ranking party officials is actually atypical for either party.

Of course, Wikileaks never released any data dumps from the Republicans, so we can't really know, I guess. Maybe the Republican Party is just a paragon of virtue and their opsec is perfect.

I know it's unfashionable, but shouldn't the parties choose a candidate they feel is most likely to do good and communicate why?

I feel the constant triangulation is a big reason why the democratic world is so messed up right now.

Maybe they should, but... come on.

Did the Republicans choose Trump because they felt he was the most likely to do good and communicate why?

Of course not.

I think we should talk more about it though. People can make a difference. Even if we can't keep this train from derailing, maybe we can slow it down a bit before impact.

And before they choose, they're supposed to determine who is more likely to win. And they admitted they didn't do that fairly as they were being run by Clinton campaign.

And yet, those are still legitimate actions for media. As a general rule, if Fox News can do it, so can Wikileaks - and it was precisely traditional media that made the dump politically damaging as opposed to Wikileaks itself, which is an obscure web repository the wast majority of the public will never access.

News organizations wouldn't drop all the emails at once. Previous enormous leaks have been handled by ICIJ members with great care, going for years of investigations, careful verifications, and publishing only pertinent stories.

But there was an election around the corner, they can't be bothered with any of that.

Why is that better than releasing all the emails at once?

Why do they get to decide what's "pertinent"?

I wonder if how Julian releases the primary source material is in line with his scientific journalism [1] practices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journalism

For the same reason that if you found yourself with access to someone's diary that you thought might be guilty of wrongdoing, you might convince yourself to look through it possibly with a lawyer friend and report on if anything illegal went on, but you might shy away from publishing the whole thing online "just in case".

One option at least pays lip service to legal and ethical considerations.

A news organization has a responsibility to present information in an informed manner in order to prevent misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Wikileaks' purpose was to paint an impression of widespread wrongdoing despite any hard evidence. Dumping a bunch of irrelevant emails all at once aids misrepresentation.

DNC misconduct etc. would have been reported by traditional organizations. I think people wonder why it was good that Wikileaks released Podesta's iCloud password, his risotto recipe, doctors appointments of random staffers, and so forth.

A credible news organization would have tons of fact checkers and editors to make sure the relevant facts made it in to any article they wrote. They wouldn't, blindly, release tons of unedited emails, including some that were doctored to make the DNC and the Clinton Campaign look bad.

Doesn't need to be state-sponsored (and most news organization aren't "state-sponsored" ... unlike RT, for example) to be credible.

Which emails were doctored? I hadn't heard about that. My understanding is that the "doctoring" done by Wikileaks consisted of selectively releasing information obtained from Democratic sources while concealing similar information related to the Republican side ( https://www.wired.com/2017/01/russia-hacked-older-republican... ).

If true, that's the point at which Assange and Wikileaks departed from the path of legitimate journalism.

The Russians doctored the email, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/guccifer-2-0-dnc-document-ru...

They did it to make it seem that the Clinton Campaign and the DNC had something nefarious going on

That had nothing to do with Assange or WikiLeaks.

Since when does the constitution require journalists publish information in a manner agreeable to you? Hell, there was a court case years ago that decided news can knowingly publish falsehoods.

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