Why are progressive editors hiding Donald Trump’s hacked emails when they ran Hillary Clinton’s?

If not in so many words, the editors of the Washington Post, New York Times and Politico once said to their readers:

“Yeah, all right, we know that in 2016 we helped Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton by printing emails Russian agents had hacked from the accounts of the Democratic National Committee.

As we might have predicted, the revelations threw the Clinton campaign into chaos, and  bolstered the impression Trump and Russia wanted to create that she was a crook who should be locked up.

We did all that. But you know what? We didn’t care. We published confidential information hacked by democracy’s enemies because we are real journalists, who write without fear or favour.  Publish and be damned. Let the chips fall where they may. The public has a right to know, and our job is to get the news out there and fuck the consequences.”

But that was 2016 and this is 2024. Everything has changed. Iran has hacked confidential emails from the Trump campaign and all of a sudden the desire of the US liberal press to inform its readers has vanished.

Matt Murray, executive editor of the Washington Post  now says that the idea that progressive editors should publish confidential information that might hurt the Trump campaign is irresponsible. 

When presented with the hacked emails:

 “All of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

What is going on? And what on earth are liberal Americans meant to make of the newspapers that claim to represent them? More to the point: why do supposed progressive journalists appear to bend over backwards to help Donald Trump, of all people?