NEW YORK ― It’s not every day The New York Times admits in a front page story to having helped a foreign power interfere in a U.S. presidential election.

But reporters at the paper offered this candid assessment in an explosive story on Russian cyber attacks directed at the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The stolen emails, written by or to Democratic officials, were distributed through different channels, such as WikiLeaks, and made available online. The news media feasted on them, amplifying unflattering details about the Democratic rival to Republican nominee Donald Trump, whom the CIA believes was Russia’s preferred candidate.

“Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence,” wrote Times reporters Eric Lipton, David Sanger and Scott Shane.

The increased scrutiny on the disruptive role Russia played in the election has triggered more reflection on the role of the media itself. And for the trio behind the Times piece, that meant acknowledging that they were subjects ― not just chroniclers ― in the story they were pursuing.

“We heard a lot from the folks we interviewed who were angry, frustrated, disappointed with the media and the role it played,” Lipton told The Huffington Post. “We thought it was important to articulate that in the story.”

Such bits of introspection may be cheered by critics who argued in real time that reporters need to show more caution when reporting on hacked documents. But for Clinton allies and fellow Democrats, it probably feels too like little and late.

The steady drip of Podesta’s emails dogged the Clinton campaign through the final month of the 2016 election cycle. The Times relied on them for a number of storiesfeaturing revelationsaboutthe Clinton campaignand prominent Democrats. Other news outlets, including HuffPost, highlighted examples of Democratic infighting, Clinton campaign strategy, petty gossip and spats, and even media entanglements.

The frenzy over the WikiLeaks releases, coupled with FBI Director James Comey’s unusual intervention in the race, contributed to Clinton receiving overwhelmingly negative coverage in the home stretch. To this day, her allies argue that those dual developments are largely to blame for her loss.

And it wasn’t just the Clinton campaign that suffered. Russian hackers targeted the DNC and House Democrats too, once more taking advantage of a scoop-happy press corps to spread the stolen material. As Lipton and Shane wrote in a separate Tuesday story, in targeting those congressional Democrats, “a de facto alliance” was “formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States.”

The media’s fixation on the contents of the hacked emails, even when Russia was believed to be responsible for making them public, has rankled Clinton allies. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a Clinton backer whose impolitic comments were unearthed in the Podesta hack, told the paper that she “could not believe that reporters were covering” them.

Inside newsrooms, however, the decision to cover wasn’t as simple as Tanden’s comment suggests. Reporters and editors may have recognized that by writing on hacked emails they were incentivizing hacking. At the same time, however, the hacks presented journalists with a trove ofinformation that was both accurate and arguably in the public’s interest. How it ended up on the internet was, in some ways, a secondary point.