The media was given insider material from the Trump campaign. They decided not to print it.

At least three news agencies have been provided with confidential materials from Donald Trump's campaign, including a report on the vetting of JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, all agencies have refused to disclose details of the information they received.

Instead, Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote about a possible hacking attack on the campaign and described in broad terms what they were planning.

Their decisions stand in stark contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hacker leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing letters, and mainstream news outlets eagerly reported on them.

Politico wrote over the weekend that it had received emails since July 22 from a person named “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document on Vance and a partial vetting report on Senator Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a possible vice president. Both Politico and the Post said two people independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

“Like many such audit documents,” the Times wrote of the Vance report, “they included earlier statements that had the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance's remarks disparaging Mr. Trump.”

It is unclear who provided the material. Politico said it did not know who “Robert” was, and when it spoke to the alleged leaker, he said: “I suggest you don't ask yourself where I got this from.”

The Trump campaign said it had been hacked and that Iranians were behind it. While the campaign did not provide evidence to support this claim, a day earlier Microsoft had issued a report detailing how an Iranian military intelligence agency had attempted to compromise the email account of a former senior presidential campaign adviser. The report did not specify which campaign was involved.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump's campaign, said over the weekend: “Any media outlet or news organization that reprints documents or internal communications is acting on behalf of America's enemies.”

The FBI released a brief statement on Monday saying, “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this case.”

The Times said it would not explain why it decided not to print details of the internal communications. A Post spokesman said: “As with all information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, any motives of the source and assess the public interest when deciding what, if anything, to publish.”

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said editors there had concluded that “the questions about the origin of the documents and how we became aware of them were more newsworthy than the content of those documents themselves.”

In fact, it wasn't long after Vance was announced as Trump's running mate that various news organizations began unearthing unflattering statements the Ohio senator had made about him.

It's also easy to remember how candidate Trump and his team in 2016 promoted coverage of Clinton campaign documents obtained by Wikileaks from hackers. The coverage was widespread: a BBC article promised “18 revelations from the Clinton emails hacked by Wikileaks” and Vox even wrote about Podesta's tips for making a great risotto.

Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination with the revelations. “Just as Russia wanted,” he said.

Unlike this year, the WikiLeaks material was made publicly available, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish it. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, the media misrepresented the material, making it seem more damaging to Clinton than it actually was, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a book about the 2016 hack.

Jamieson said news organizations made the right decision this year not to release details of Trump campaign material because they could not be sure of the source.

“How do you know you are not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” asked Jamieson. She is conservative in her publishing decisions “because we live in the age of disinformation,” she said.

Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University, also believes the news organizations made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said it appears that a foreign agent's attempt to influence the 2024 presidential election was more newsworthy than the leaked material itself.

But Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, said the media could have said more. While previous statements by Vance about Trump are readily available to the public, the audit document could have shown which statements most affected the campaign or revealed things that journalists did not know.

Once the accuracy of the material is established, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he said.

“I don't think they handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they didn't properly learn the lesson from 2016.”

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David Bauder writes about media for AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.