Russia has weaponized the American press
Vox makes the argument that Russia has weaponized the American press. They make it sound as if the US press is playing into the Russian's hands.
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.