New York Times reporter Amy Chozick's just-released memoir, Chasing Hillary, offers a detailed and direct admission that major media outlets played into Russian President Vladimir Putin's hands by devoting obsessive coverage to hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. It's a striking acknowledgment, given how defensive the Times and its campaign journalists have generally been about their work. [...]

In a chapter titled "How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence," Chozick, who spent a decade covering Hillary Clinton for the Times and The Wall Street Journal, recounts the October afternoon when WikiLeaks began releasing a new set of documents obtained from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's Gmail account. By then, journalists had reason to suspect that hackers working for Russian intelligence services were the source of the emails. Nonetheless, Chozick writes that she "chose the byline" rather than urging her editors to consider the possibility that the paper was being used by a hostile government. She was not alone -- virtually every major publication devoted significant attention to the hacked emails.

Only after the election, when Times national security reporters detailed how the all-consuming reporting had aided the Russian plot, did Chozick come to grips with what she had done: "[N]othing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was they were right."