Gawker Is Dead and Deserved to Die (2017)
thefederalist.com
thefederalist.com
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It's true that defending freedom often implies defending scoundrels. But it's a failure of logic to assume that we can't stop scoundrels, generally, if we want to protect freedom.
Gawker didn't just screw up. It was habitually irredeemably horrible. If there is to be any limit to conduct online at all it seemed inevitable that they'd eventually cross it.
We should be proud of our civilization that it was an orderly legal process that ended it, rather than a violent vigilante reprisal.
Gawker died because, as it turns out, Peter Thiel wanted it dead, and had enough money to buy the outcome he wanted. It was astonishing that he prevailed in the initial suit, but gobsmacking that the judge referred to issue a stay pending appeal -- which, in practical terms, meant the appeal was impossible.
Gawker was murdered by a craven jackass and a broken and complicit legal system. OBVIOUSLY, though, the Federalist will come down on the side of the moneyed class and their favorite tech investor.
This is because they have no principles.
Dying on the hill to keep a sex tape of a washout wrestler was in the name of journalism? There are real journalists out there that lost their careers fighting to publish real stories about political and corporate corruption, war crimes, human suffering and more. Not sex tapes. Gawker didn't have any real journalists. This was a group of frat boys enjoying causing mayhem in random people's lives as long as they got to profit from it. So no, you have no principles.
it absolutely was journalism, of a very real variety, dishing all kinds of dirt on all manners of people we would never really know anything about.
it seems so exceedingly sad that people will take this example or that & use it to reject what an insanely rare view this was into the sometimes pretty weird ass lifestyles of the (tech) rich and (tech) famous. and sometimes some other random stories that came by.
Marie Colvin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Colvin
Brian Barger: https://jacklimpert.com/2021/03/brian-barger/
Bob Woodward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woodward
Those are just three that popped in my head. War journalist, Iran-Contra, Watergate. Their work didn't contain where someone put their prick or what someone put in their snatch or ass during a vacation getaway. Galivanting Gawker as journalistic because it may have broken clocked onto a handful of stories while 99% of it was just trash means you have a pretty warped mind on what constitutes as information. Desire for "dirt" on someone's life, no matter how poor or rich, is a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore.
most media coverage is polished & spun. having a raw read on what important people are like, what they get up to: that is a worthy thing for the world to be tracking, to have some sense of.
you seem just to not like it. and be willing to judge on ultra simplified shallow assessment, of the lowest easiest to hit points, without respecting that even low journalism has a function & role. you revert to slandering & badmouthing at the end to impress your "moral" point ("a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore") which reads to me as narrow minded in it's refusal to consider gawker's truth telling value & heavy handedly belttilting in it's moral judgementality. I expect at least some sign of recognition, some acknowledgement of the value of showing the unfiltered truths. we people imo were greater for having some ability to see the unseen background of the valley's famous, it seems obvious & clear to me, even though it was often an inglorious reality. without this we have no context. we have only the manufactured, the presented, the PR. the world needs more than prescriptivist upstanding reporting, in part because the world is just too interesting & weird & odd, and that's okay too be part of the story too. even when it's not spit and polished great stories.
there's countless stories of internal Google etc dramas, the weird execs & their odd lifestyles behind these shifts, how they allies & clashed that Valleywag/Gawker gave that no one else would ever have brought to light. an extremely informative moral service. because the point was to be undiscerning. the point was to tell, to fill in some of the background in the paintings. that seems to be too much for many. people don't like hearing this part or that, like you seem to oppose. I don't get how people can turn their nose up at this stuff. they probably judge only by what few small sensationized examples they know: they probably aren't fit to judge, don't know what they were missing. unlike jersey shore, unlike most celebrities, these are real people with colossal power being described. having some context, some view, meant everything, made the companies look like a collection of people. something no one else does. and that was taken. by the powerful. worth mourning.
If you are going to push envelopes and speak truth to the rich and powerful, speak a truth that has some level of impact for societal good. I am not going to weep for your gossip rag’s demise when your biggest news scoops center around outing rich guys and showcasing some old wrestlers schlong.
Gawker, on the other hand, was a widely read and appreciated outlet silenced by one of the country’s worst billionaires.
They have principles. Among them is the principle that the people who amass the most resources should be the one who determine how society is run.
I'm not looking to defend Gawker, but I believe that comparing it and its impact versus competitors/substitutes is absolutely relevant.
You see it all the time in politics where people are outraged at X when the other party does it, but can't be assed to care when X is done by their own party. They're lying that they care about X. The truth is they're using it as a lie for political power.
- "I think that this other person did a bad thing X."
- "You're lying, your other actions show that you don't really think X is a bad thing."
How is that an argument? The issue was originally that some other person did a bad thing X, but the second person above changed it to attack the first person making the argument, and accused the first person about lying about what they really think. Is this not an ad-hominem?
Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.
If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation.
The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.
If one goes around committing tortious invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress, one will get sued for it eventually, and possibly lose in court.
Yes, even if you call yourself a "journalist" while doing so. Yes, even if your targets for abuse are icky-poo wrongthinkers like Thiel and Bollea, who shouldn't have access to legal remedies because darn it, they have declasse opinions contra to the "speak truth to power" crowd.
Getting sued is getting off easy, and deep down Denton & co. knew that losing in court was the worst thing that could happen to them-it wasn't like they embarrassed John Gotti or Chapo Guzman, or someone else whose retaliation would involve semtex and garrottes.
Insightful, that.