Hi swombat,
Regarding gawker, as I remember, there was a discussion here whether to ban it, and most people were for the ban. The reason was the low quality of journalism and defamation tendencies in some of its articles. So gawker is indeed banned.
Techcrunch is influential and as such it is relevant for many people here. You can ban a site that is nasty and irrelevant, but you cannot ban a very relevant site just because some articles are odious.
Banning should not be about morals, but rather about usefulness.
Moralistic != useful
But your mileage may vary.
(Yes, this is a joke)
Gawker, I can totally understand. Infochachkie, on the other hand, seems like a pretty decent site so I'm not quite sure why they were banned. Are there others which were banned that we don't know about? Were they banned for a good reason? Can your own site/blog/etc get banned in a similar way? What are the criteria? What should you avoid doing? etc.