Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy

One man's libel/slander is another man's investigate journalism ("muckraking" in the US). In this particular case, Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.

> it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers

It's actually much harder to win a libel/slander suit as a public figure. See: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/libel-defamation

View on HN

Your comment exposed me to the big gap between the meanings of muckraker in US and UK English:

1. (US) One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons.

2. (Britain) A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.

Interesting! I'm going to change my language from "muckraking" to "investigative journalism". Thanks for pointing this out.

The term was coined as a perjorative (by Teddy Roosevelt) and then co-opted as a term of honor by the journalists he was attacking.

At least in my schooling, Upton Sinclair was held up as the very model of a muckraker, and he was certainly anything but (2) above. Perhaps sensationalist on occasion, but strongly principled.

Roosevelt was applying the term to journalists at publications like McClure's. There's a great book about this period by Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit) that I can't recommend highly enough.

I'm American and I've only heard a muckraker described as number 2.

ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sources, describes some of their articles as "muckreads". They use the word proudly, with the implication that they've gone to lengths that the general public would/could not to find out important information.

As someone said, it was a pejorative term that was reclaimed, and that makes a lot of sense to me now.

Talking Points Memo does the same.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker

It was part of the American History 11th grade course I took in HS in the early 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

Does that really change the underlying belief? Whether what Gawker did was libel, an invasion of privacy, or any other crime it boils down to Gawker violating the rights of other individuals and building a business model around that practice. This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity. They aren't even in the same ballpark.

> This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity.

I agree, but the reason Gawker lost is important. It was because they violated someone's privacy.

I strongly support violating the privacy of powerful, public figures in the future if it serves public interest. I agree that Gawker was stupid, greedy, and overreaching here, but I still worry that next time, the sex tape (or whatever it is) will be equally private but much more important to the public.

> but I still worry that next time...

People are acting like their is no thought put into these type of court cases. This isn't a universal precedent that applies to every situation. It doesn't prevent any journalist from pursuing legitimate news stories and invading privacy along the way. It only prevents journalist from invading someone's privacy where the only story is the invasion itself.

Huh? That's not true at all.

A billionaire could fund cases against a media company entirely irrespective of the merit of those cases - the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves, even if it's as simple as just getting it thrown out of court. Do it enough times and you've bankrupted the company.

For an example, Mother Jones was brought to the brink of bankruptcy for reporting an entirely true and legitimate story:

http://m.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersl...

Well run media companies have insurance for this type of thing. When Mother Jones lists the cost of that lawsuit, they combined both the costs they paid with the costs the insurance company paid for a total of $2.5 million. You need to separate those two costs out if you want to prove the Mother Jones was legitimately on the brink of bankruptcy due to the lawsuit. Otherwise it just appears to be an insurance company doing the job they are paid to do.

Even still, it's $650k out of Mother Jones's pocket. Unless you're Buzzfeed or a TV network, that's more than any media organisation can easily swallow.

Plus Gawker's case was specifically structured to avoid an insurance payout. A blueprint for others in the future.

> Well run media companies have insurance for this type of thing

It looks like you haven't been paying close attention to the Gawker suite: Gawker also had insurance, but Bollea strategically dropped a charge that would have let Gawker claim against insurance (and at the same time reducing the total amount he would receive). This suite isn't about damages: it's about bankrupting Gawker for better or for worse. There's nothing that suggests a similar strategy can't be employed against Mother Jones.

I have been following the Gawker case and if the prosecutors can adjust the case in such a way to avoid insurance it tells me that either Gawker didn't have the right kind of insurance or that the insurance company found Gawker liable in such a way that they lost the right to coverage. Either way, that is a Gawker problem and not a problem of legal precedent.

> the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves

That's obviously a big problem. I have never understood why America insists on a dogmatic principle that inherently and unavoidably gives a vast advantage to well-off parties over poor parties. You can get away with a lot of vexatious litigation before the courts (a) notice it and (b) actually act upon it.

I think it ensures that journalists will be reticent to violate the privacy of powerful, public figures... If it's on a sex tape.

There is no problem with the next thing. You can report about the sex tape, what is happening (because what was happening is also reprehensible) without releasing the tape itself. You know, they reported on Snowden's leaks and Panama Papers without releasing them. It's not impossible by any means.

I don't think that poster is talking about Hogan.

| Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.

...not to mention, Hogan's public persona and living he has earned has been by posing as a larger than life clownish character; I don't even see that he was harmed. Ask yourself, do you think less of Hogan now? (and not because it turns out that he has less impressive sounding real name)

I'd have more sympathy for a "normal" person.

Hogan can't eat our positive thoughts. He lost a lot of respect among the kind of people that (economically) matter a lot to him, like sponsors and employers.

I get the idea of what you said, but did he, really measurably? plus: the information released about him was accurate; who says you get to have secrets that disqualify you from jobs that you hide from your employer? I'm not saying we want to have a big brother society, but I am saying if you present yourself as wholesome (whatever that means) and you are not wholesome, then you are false advertising anyway, to people who care about that.

Anyway maybe it made him relevant again ("there is no such thing as bad PR"), I had forgotten he existed. Need to wait for some time to go by before it's clear.

I'm not advocating a side or devil's advocating, i just prefer the "less outraged middle" over the "outraged extremes"

Jennifer Lawrence's persona and living are based on being extremely attractive, so was it Ok to hack her iCloud and publish her nude selfies? Strangely, Gawker crowd was very upset that no one went to jail for it.

I'm not saying Gawker is OK or not, nor that they are hypcocrites or not.

I'm talking about the standards that courts use to measure "harm". Young starlets have so many sex tapes (their own and hacked) out there, and it doesn't seem to harm them much.

It's almost as if a porn star could make a better claim that they lost the commercial potential of something stolen!

Again, I'm not saying that I want to live in a world where it's ok to steal people's sex tapes and put them out there; but I am also noting that in today's world, it is much less of a "harm" or even an embarrassment to people than it was when the system of torts was established. Since torts are based on harm, we run into the issue of "how much harm did this cause?"

maybe it needs to be made illegal like "upskirts". (and I'm not advocating that, either. I'm saying, I'd like some clarity to exactly what people are outraged by)

Ah yes, society should recognize the positive impacts of investigative journalism. I can hardly see a between the Pentagon Papers and a sex tape!

What if a conservative politician lobbies for adultery being illegal, and then a sex tape emerges of him cheating on his wife? That's important journalism.

What if the CEO of a company intimidates an employee into having sex with him and secretly films it, and that gets released? That's also important journalism.

There are lots of other ways sex tapes could be newsworthy: a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!), a Hollywood director asks for sex in exchange for a role, etc. etc.

But that's not gawkers business, so ... ?

Are all sex tapes journalism? Including revenge porn?

There is a difference between reporting on the existence of a sex tape and publishing said tape. None of the examples you gave require the tape to be published.

Do you also think that good taste required reporting on the Mohammed cartoons without actually showing them?

Yes. (But I do think the right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending)

Ah, my question is ambiguous between "showing the Mohammed cartoons would be in bad taste" and "showing the Mohammed cartoons can't be allowed because it would be in bad taste".

So let me make some points myself:

1. Publishing the cartoons themselves makes a variety of statements that can't be made by reporting on their existence without showing them.

2. Those statements have great value, independent of any questions of taste.

3. Everything slg says about the difference between publishing a report that a sex tape exists vs publishing the tape itself applies in full to the Mohammed cartoons.

The right to tasteless speech is important and worth defending, but I'm not trying to do that here. I want to counter the argument slg is making, which is that tasteless reporting should be prohibited when you could approximate the same report in better taste. The raw facts always have an inherent value beyond a reporter's interpretation of them.

You are viewing this wrong because it isn't about tastelessness. It is about infringing on the rights of others. Publishing the Mohammed comic isn't infringing on anyone's rights (at least in the US with our strong freedom of speech and lack of federal blasphemy laws.) However you have a right to not be unknowingly filmed while having sex and have that video published. In the comic example you might be offending someone's sensibilities but that isn't enough to violate their rights like the sex tape example.

Or let's use a different example like the Stanford rape case. No one is reporting the name of the victim of that case, but her name is a "raw fact" of the case. Would you support releasing her name and if not, how is that different that releasing the sex tape?

> Would you support releasing her name and if not, how is that different that releasing the sex tape?

Against someone saying there should be legal liability for releasing it, definitely.

What are those valuable statements? I don't see any value in publishing the Mohammed cartoons themselves (except perhaps as retaliation against those who went beyond the law to try to suppress them).

> a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!)

This seems to be Denton's major defense of the newsworthiness of the tape (although even he argues it half-heartedly).

I don't buy it. The racist comments on one part of the tape don't make the actual sex part newsworthy. They posted a heavily edited version of the tape, which meant they included the sex intentionally. Seems obvious the purpose of those segments was simple voyeurism, which is an invasion of privacy.

The "but he's a racist" defense strikes me as a cynical attempt to latch onto the current mainstream social-justice train, when really this has nothing to do with racism.

As I understand it, Gawker considered the racist remarks so uninteresting they didn't even include them in their original edit or coverage of the sex tape. They only became public as a result of Hulk Hogan suing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com