If a reporter’s job is not “learn what powerful people are talking about in secret, and then share it with everybody else,” then I sincerely do not know what the fuck it is, or why we are supposed to believe it has any value whatsoever.
Here is a document that “elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists” have been circulating among themselves in secret “for weeks” is not merely a permissible news story. It needs no radical extremist reporting catechism to smile upon it. Publishing that document, if you have gotten your hands on it, is the most basic and essential act of reporting. The mandate to publish that document is not a matter of journalistic ethics, but the entire reason to have a free press. If the reason not to publish it is fealty to some code of ethics, then that code of ethics serves only to uphold reporters as a privileged class of information brokers. Of what value is that to the public?