Gawker is not journalism. TMZ is not journalism. It is global village gossip justified and reimagined as journalism.
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You may not like what Gawker does with some of its site, I donât like everything and mostly ignore them (though I like Jalopnik). Gawker Media includes includes Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel, which do a lot of things, some of which would be fair to call journalism. You might hate them all. But for some billionaire to be upset that he was outed by an no-longer-existent site, Valleywag, once run by Gawker, and decide to destroy a media company is a terrible, terrible thing. You might be comfortable with billionaires deciding which media companies may live, and which should be ruined. Iâm definitely not.
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they may be, but i still enjoy what they have been posting lately.
As was pointed out to me, and thisis likely old at for folk here, couldnât this be used as a sort of preview for trumpâs âi want to hold news agencies liable for slander?â Yes Gawker is a parasite and i shed no tears for them. However âoh we were able to sucessfully sue these people. that means we get to sue this guy for making our company look bad by exposing dirt we wanted kept out of the limelight.â
I dunno if it works that way but YeaâŚ
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Publishing someoneâs private sex tape is disanalogous to slander, no.
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Alright.
Just a case of âIâm used to seeing shit in the news. how is this one thing i like seeing going to turn out to also be shit?â
This wasnât censorship though, this was Gawker being hoisted by their own petard. The fact that Thiel funded the lawsuits doesnât change the fact that the lawsuit was legitimate, and the judgment reached through the courts. Gawker played fast and loose with facts, in a way no legitimate news organization would. Being sued was inevitable and considered the cost of doing business, until they met someone as well funded as they.
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Yes, it wasnât censorship. Still, it was a billionaire secretly deciding to destroy a media outlet and using his wealth to do so. Gawker did some bad things. The response was totally incommensurate to the offense and motivated by a desire a billionaire prick wanting vengeance, not justice. The lawyers secretly gamed the legal system at the prompting of Theil to get the outcome he wanted.
Gawker: bad.
Thiel: unconscionably amoral, and far, far worse.
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In a fight between two super-rich assholes who have no concern for the welfare of others, I have a hard time blaming one and having compassion for the other. As for those poor writers, I have little sympathy for them either; they worked for a sleaze ball, and directly or indirectly supported every slimy story that went out through Gawker. Hopefully theyâll learn something from this when they go off to work for ZD or start their own sites, and not repeat the mistakes of their bosses.
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Iâd have like to have seen Gawker served justice commensurate with their behavior. That didnât happen. The result is a greater injustice than the problem, and a bad precedent.
Saying itâs cool to threaten the jobs of the folks at Jalopnik/etc. because their parent company also hosts sites that are gross gossip rags seems more like vindictiveness than anything else to me.
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Is it, though? Gawker is a stain on American journalism, routinely violating people and the law. We inveigh against the decision that a college student who sexually assaulted a woman only got a few months in jail, but Gawker routinely engaged in the journalistic equivalent of that, with even less consequence.
Corporations are people too, my friend. And sometimes those corporations need to get locked up just like any other offender. If that means, in the corporate sense, they get broken up, sold, or dissolved, so be it. Anything else would be a slap on the wrist.
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Theyâre a media company with a collection of sites, some past and current ones have been gossip rags, others have never done anything wrong. I never said that they shouldnât face justice, I only see no justice served in this case, and see yet another bad precedent for journalistic freedom. Iâve said my piece and am now done.
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Indeed. I have no love for Gawker. I just⌠fear really.
Fear that Gawker will get snapped up, rebranded and go about their way.
Fear that While Gawker is decidedly in the wrong here and deserving getting strung up, that we will see less deserving entities hounded after in the future.
People have to eat, pay their bills (of which journalism school probably costs a fair bit) and make a living. I donât doubt there are many that donât care what they write, but then you have people that probably couldnât get picked up by someone else, got hired in, and are just grateful for steady work. In a perfect world they could have all walked, but this world is far from perfect, so while itâd feel all warm and fuzzy to tar them all with the same brush. I doubt the grunts have any kind of say in what goes on, and while âjust following ordersâ doesnât excuse war crimes⌠would you like to eat? Would you like to pay for your family to live decently? At some point the line has to be drawn and blurred into a gradiant between headline writers who are definately in on ruining peopleâs lives, and people doing copy work or research or even sweeping the building who all youâd be doing is just being a vindictive asshole for no reason other than a vauge gawker association.
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Enjoyable? HmmmâŚkinda average, it feels understaffed and overstretched. Content io9 did well is â not just editorial but comment forum responses â now better covered elsewhereâŚlike Verge, Inverse, Motherboard, and Ars Technica to cite four. And, you know, boing boing.
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⌠except of course for that part where they were guilty of publishing libel. Breakin the law is cool, and no one should ever be punished for that right?
Youâre defending a company that published a sex tape for a has-been b-list sports celebrity. But thatâs journalism, right?
Iâm sure Walter Cronkite would have been proud of them.
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If youâd like to understand my fuller position, feel free to read the string of comments Iâve made just above your post that will help you see that your concerns are unfounded.
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Part of Journalism is having some ethics about it. It may be terribly unfortunate and your heart bleeds for the people of Jalopnik or Gizmodo who had no part in the celebrity sleaze; but the fact is they knew the kind of company they were working for and anytime Gawker did something like this they put everyoneâs jobs at risk. Thereâs no such thing as a free ride, and people like you who continue to imply that there is something morally wrong with the justice system punishing them are the real problem here. It doesnât matter one whit why Peter Thiel bankrolled the action or that he did at all, except in that justice was served.
Will this have a chilling effect on other journalists and media outlets? I sure fucking hope so. Perhaps it will make them think twice before assuming they can profit from libel, that they are in fact accountable for their actions. Real journalists would consider the ethics of their content before doing so.
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You signed up to post this? Thatâs sad. Anyway, Iâm not interested in having a discussion with your feelings. Feel free to carry on without me. Ciao.
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It wasnât libel, it was invasion of privacy. (I donât think you understand the definition of libel.)
Apologies to @nemomen for continuation. 
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