What’s the difference between being the first to publish information from the leak and merely reposting it? The contents of the leak are already public; they’re just not in a very user-friendly format until a news outlet decides to amplify a piece of it. Which means, one could argue, that the press is merely drawing lines of best fit through a dataset. It could also mean that the press is essentially finishing what the hackers started.
It’s not a matter of whether Sony now “deserves” to be cyberterrorized or not, but rather whether the value of what we have learned outweighs how we learned it. We decided that it was important for you to know how the MPAA plans to influence how you experience the internet, and by extension, how they intend to shape the future of the information marketplace; we could all agree that it had more impact on our world and our lives than top-secret internal intelligence that Scott Rudin is a meanie.
So this is the horse we’ve chosen in this race, and the editorial staff at The Verge stands by our decision to invest our energy in this story as researched and reported by Russell Brandom, Ross Miller, and Bryan Bishop. We think it’s valuable to our readers and anyone who plans to spend any time on internet in the future. We are all also very aware that had we waited a couple more hours, it would probably no longer be our horse.
Emphasis mine, but I’m glad to see Emily from theverge giving a thorough explanation to what is otherwise glossed over by the information beast that is the media.
