A judge and jury of our peers disagreed that it was a “travesty of justice”, as do I.
I do cheer Gawker’s downfall, and I will continue to do so as long as I live.
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Judges and juries aren’t always right (see OJ Simpson, et al). If in a case one side has deep pockets, they stand a better chance, since outcomes in our system are not a perfect blind justice, but one where outcomes to some degree are a product that can purchased, esp. in civil suits.
I have no love for Gawker, but would have preferred them face justice than a thin-skinned billionaire’s revenge via the courts. You might think the outcome’s just, I don’t. Even if I won’t complain about some aspects of the outcome, other aspects overshadow that since they’re deeply unsettling and damaging to the 1st Amendment to my eyes. Happy to agree to disagree, since I don’t think we’ll find common ground.
From the article:
Nor should we take for granted that the judge and jury decided the case wisely, because most of our cherished free-speech rights have been recognized by appellate courts after judges and juries erred. The right for high school students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the right to burn a flag, the right for Hustler magazine to satirize Jerry Falwell, the right for the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers without prior restraint, the requirement that public officials prove that journalists engaged in actual malice before winning a defamation case – all of these important rights arose from Supreme Court decisions correcting the mistakes of trial courts and juries.
In short, we shouldn’t just assume that crushing bad people is just or defensible. We don’t need the 1st Amendment to defend popular speech, we need it to protect unpopular speech; our civic obligations are at their peak precisely when loathsome people are on the line.
Though Thiel crushed Gawker through victory, he might well have crushed it in defeat. Defending a civil suit, whatever its merits, is often a years-long pitched battle. Eventual vindication rarely comes with reimbursement of fees and costs, let alone compensation for the disruption and stress. Most victories are Pyrrhic. Few factors deter vengeance by litigation; one is that litigation is impossibly expensive, even for plaintiffs. A billionaire’s support eliminates that barrier and allows angry people to silence speakers they hate.
That doesn’t mean we should stop the rich from funding causes they care about. It means that the cause of free speech requires us constantly to reevaluate our legal system and demand that the process of litigation itself cannot prove ruinous. Again, that’s true even when hated gossip-mongers are at the receiving end of that litigation. We owe this vigilance to ourselves — as the potential next targets — and to our free-speech heritage
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Sounds like Thiel is one who engages in the occasional noble battle while waging a terrible war.
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As for billionaires having too much power in the US, that ship sailed decades ago. Putting litigation support aside, I can think of many, many other ways a billionaire could make your life extremely unpleasant.
If the litigation was frivolous, ala patent trolls, I could empathize. But these cases weren’t frivolous, they were based on real injustices Gawker committed against other human beings.
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No one is asking you to empathize. White makes it quite clear that he thinks that Gawker deserved what happened to them. All that he’s saying is that how they were killed is troubling, to say the least, which is why you should hold your applause.
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Like has nothing to do with it. They played a game and lost. Worse, their puffery of The Big Talk does not make them right – they used the standard empty justification the bottom-feeders in communications use to justify what they say or do. It is in the name of truth, freedom, and democracy! It is your right to know about aging Kardashian butt! It is our duty to speculate on reality show rejects so you have something to stick on your social media feed! The bad guys will win if we don’t show the sex tapes of a man who made his living rolling around in a ring with other sweaty men in their underpants thirty years ago!
Stuff it.
Panty-sniffing is not journalism. Gossip is not journalism. Writing about has-been or never-were celebrities who do not have influence on the things that actually matter is not news. It is trash.
Those leeches have absolutely no right to ride on the coat tails of real journalism and hide behind it to get all of the benefits, but do none of the work or take any of the risk. Shame on them.
People have completely forgotten what is journalism. It is shocking and disturbing how fast society has become completely ignorant of the absolute basic concepts for progress and survival, such as what does it mean to be informed.
We have advertising, stenography, gossip, opinion, propaganda, narcissism, uninformed speculation, rumour, lies, posturing, publicity, moral mastrubation, and filler galore, but real news is nearly novnexistent. I am tired of pseudo-news producers throwing self-serving tantrums and spewing their sophistry whenever they find themselves in a scrape of their own making.
The suit against Gawker is not about journalism. It is about those entities that are unreasonable facsimiles of it.
The Big Talk is something I heard plenty as a journalist who covered the business and ethics of journalism, and this one is no different. This is a case about an institutional bully and poseur that got away with it with sophistry, arrogance, filler, dirt, and image manipulation – and when people who were on the receiving end got together to say enough and stood up to them, finally introduce it to the concept of consequences.
The case is pure farce played out in the gutter. I am sure while those at Gawker were having a grand old time covering fluff, there were people in power oppressing other people, poisoning them, harming them, manipulating them, exploiting them, violating their rights, and rigging the board to favour the tyrants. I am certain there were people becoming homeless, sick, abused, and trapped, but they were not gawk-worthy because audiences don’t want to face reality and truth and want to be lulled with a time-sink of watching a former wrestler getting nookie.
That is not being informed. That is not informing. They have no business smugly giving The Big Talk about journalism because they have no clue what journalism is, but not everyone is gullible to believe it.
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It’s still okay to disapprove of steadily creeping oligarchy even if it’s already bad.
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You seem to be doing about as perfect a job as possible of illustrating Ken White’s point for him. I’m not sad for Gawker, but still don’t like the implications of the outcome.
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They were killed because they regularly made enemies, and they made those enemies by regularly committing crimes against other human beings.
There’s no way a billionaire could kill off, say, The Washington Post, because it’s a real newspaper that doesn’t commit crimes against other human beings as a “normal” side-effect of publishing their stories. I like to call that journalism.
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You have much more faith in both the legal system and in the Washington Post than I have.
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