2016 Postmortem

I'd take your question a step further: why does the fact that emails are hacked and leaked become a story about the victim, redounding negatively onto them, even when there's nothing very damning contained in them?

I agree with those who say it's about a headline. And somehow, getting hacked casts some weird shadow on the hackee, not the hacker. It's as if people's thinking process is: if that person or institution got hacked, there's something in there they wanted to hide. Don't know what it is, but it must be bad.