The New York Times’s newfound respect for journalistic ethics, in which it disdains (still) to print hacked climate-change e-mails because they “have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye,” is not only a departure from the Times’s own past practices, recent and historic, but goes against more than two centuries of American tradition. As I wrote in 1998, during the Lewinsky business, “American history is chock-full of scandals precipitated by stolen letters, intercepted messages, and secret tapes, stretching back before the Revolution.” Perhaps the earliest practitioner was one of the founders of American journalism (and everything else American), Benjamin Franklin.
In 1772, a source whose identity remains unknown gave Franklin some letters that Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, had written to a member of Parliament. In the letters, Hutchinson advocated taking a firm line against the liberty-minded Massachusetts colonists, restricting their freedoms and suppressing them by force if necessary. Franklin, who was in London at the time on colonial business, sent the letters to his associates in Boston with instructions to show them only to a few trustworthy supporters and keep them secret from the public.
That held up about as well as you’d expect. After the letters were leaked and printed, such an uproar developed that Hutchinson was forced to resign. Tories complained about what today would be called an invasion of Hutchinson’s privacy, but the precedent had been set: Once private correspondence has become public, regardless of how it was obtained, it’s fair game for the press. That’s one of the oldest and best-established traditions of American journalism, and it’s a little late for the Times to suddenly start getting puritanical.