What was extra-awful was that I was going through a stressful time and IO9 was generally somewhere I’d go for ‘feelgood’ stuff, so I was extra annoyed to have all that horrible stuff appearing in the left where I couldn’t ignore it and had NOTHING to do with my desire to relax with Sci-fi and goofy critters!
I was really attached to IO9 because my wife loved it when she was with us and it was part of our morning routine, so I might have taken it a bit personally, but I also probably gave WAY too much benefit of the doubt because of it.
It is hard to justify it. Hogan is a '80s entertainment curiosity who holds no power or clout. It is not as if there was any newsworthiness with the story…
I think that’s pretty dismissive. For an “'80s entertainment curiosity” you’d be pretty hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know who he is, what he looks like, or what he’s famous for. He has managed to be active in the world of professional wrestling well past his prime up until he was fired by the WWE.
As for the “it’s hard to feel bad about him” aspect – yeah, the guy is a certifiable scumbag. Any self-respecting professional wrestling enthusiast will have a laundry list of reasons to dislike him that date back decades. He’s been outed as a racist. He is the man responsible for giving us Brooke and and Nick hogan. One is criminally untalented, while the other is an untalented criminal. There’s really little reason to like the guy.
Strip away the celebrity, the scandalous aspects like the cuckoldry, and the racist remarks what you really end up with this at its most distilled: two consenting adults had a rather conventional sexual encounter, someone videotaped it without their knowledge, it was then “leaked” to the press. That’s just terrible – and Gawker deserves to get punished for perpetuating this.
It is dismissive because he has no impact on policy, economics, society mores, law or anything else. Who cares? Is he the only man having sex? There is a bottom line and he is not relevant. He does not hold lives in the balance. He does not change lives or alter people’s livelihood one way or another.
Ergo, interest in him is just meddlesome, we-got-no-lives, life-sinking Gladys Kravitz gossiping ennui and Gawker was just being a nosy global village busybody and they have been forced to pay the piper.
The only time that somebody getting drug through the mud publicly like that should be even vaguely acceptable is if they are specifically impacting public policy…and even then it should be amazingly limited.
We’re talking about human beings here, and generally we’re not talking crimes, we’re talking personal and private things.
Just because something’s legal doesn’t mean it should be. It’s still amazingly immoral and sends bad messages to the rest of society.
And yeah, I think you’re right, it sometimes helps to have the same thing come out from a couple of different angles to get things woven together properly.
Plus…it is SUPER strange that it’s okay to ruin people’s lives because they’re ‘famous’…it’s not an ethical thing, it’s a capitalistic thing…it’s kind of jarring if you think too hard about it, y’know?
Not sure about the initial part on what potential is present on the phone, but my opinion is there’s likely nothing there and nothing the FBI needs in any case, it’s pure precedent for future surveillance activities…
After all, the phone is crackable despite what anyone says, even if they can’t find a hack all they need to do is isolate the flash chip, dump it then brute-force it. It’s just that’d have a huge cost in both time and resources to actually do in real-life…
I think the jury was right to decide in Hogan’s favor, but I think the award is at least an order of magnitude too high, and I’m concerned by his lawyer’s use of the word “balance”. While there are certainly exceptions to the First Amendment, those exceptions have been specifically enumerated in case law. The suggestion that they should be determined by some kind of balancing test, that free speech is subject to some kind of measurement of whether it does more good than harm, may make intuitive sense to juries, but as legal theory it is bad and dangerous.
But the most notable aspect of Denton’s article is where he lays out what he believes Hogan’s real motivation was for bringing the case: not protecting his privacy, but preventing other, more damaging information from being released. “As our lawyers argued in legal briefs that were kept secret by the trial judge from the public—and even from me—until an appeals court unsealed them on Friday, Hogan filed the claim because he was terrified that one of the other tapes, which memorialized his rant about his daughter dating ‘f-----g n-----s,’ might emerge.” Denton claims that there is more evidence in the form of text messages between Hogan and Bubba. That evidence wasn’t given to the jury, but it may play a major part in Gawker’s appeal.
In short, the suing of gawker is a message to all news coverage of not exposing bigotry and criminal activities by celebrities. In short, he didn’t want to end up like Bill Cosby.
I’m pretty sure the boundary is PERSONAL and PRIVATE activity… things that aren’t criminal and have no influence on public policy.
Bill Cosby and criminal actions aren’t really relevant to this discussion, instead this is more in line with the Conde Nast CEO outing (which was honestly way worse than the Hulk thing)
