One other note if you think that this is a free speech issue.
Do you buy newspapers? because in the end there business model is dying not from billionaires attacking it but because aggregate sites ate there lunch, and people stopped buying them.
why get excited by this but not the death of paper cuts that’s effecting all newspapers?
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Well aren’t you just a sparkling ray of sunshine who’s a sheer pleasure to be around?
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I think you’re confused. Gawker didn’t ruin Bollea’s career. His own actions did. Gawker just revealed them. See also: Edward Snowden didn’t make the US less secure, the NSA’s illegal practices did & Chelsea Manning didn’t commit war crimes, the soldiers whose actions she revealed did.
Publishing excerpts of a sex tape is nowhere near the severity of running someone over with a car while drunk. DUI and vehicular assault are criminal acts. If Daulerio doesn’t have millions of dollars, then freezing his accounts is like beating a kid up because he didn’t have any lunch money to steal. If punishment were warranted, it should only be borne by Gawker because Daulerio was working for Gawker.
What crime was committed? If a crime was committed, why wasn’t Gawker and its employees arrested and charged with a crime? You’re mixing up civil lawsuits and criminal charges here. They’re significantly different.
Lawyers aren’t obligated to be dicks. They were directed to exact revenge on Thiel’s behalf. Not every lawyer in this scenario would have gone after Daulerio the way they did. Lawyers also choose to accept clients and the lawsuits they bring. The lawyers are complicit. Saying otherwise is to justify sociopathy.
So if Bollea knew that he was being filmed, would your opinion be different? Bubba said that Bollea knew he was being taped before he settled with him and then changed his story after that. The other participant, Bubba’s wife, knew she was being taped, despite her testimony in the trial because she spoke of the taping in the tape.
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I think the important comparison is with Mother Jones, who survived the attempt a billionaire made at getting them closed down via a lawsuit, and whose investigations into private prisons led to the recent decision by the Justice Dept. to stop using them.
On a personal level, I couldn’t give a rats-ass about anything Gawker ever published (their other properties aside), but allowing billionaires to bankroll (not especially convincing) lawsuits until they find one that can take down publishers they don’t like clearly isn’t a good thing.
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I could take issue with the more breathless hyperbole in the article, but I will pick up on this one point. Quite frankly, I would rather see more application of the “corporate death penalty”.
Also, the way this issue, and an increasing number of others, are being covered in an increasingly binary way online. No room for subtle differences, just two directly opposing and antagonistic camps. I suppose this is yet another example of post-subtleist discourse.
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Stealing that phrase!
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The framing of these questions is deplorable.
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It’s interesting how appalled journalists are that the public is unwilling to consider Gawker remotely in the same category as Mother Jones, or the NYT. And that we’re perfectly fine drawing a line in the sand delineating the two.
It’s the internet! Everything is Journalism Now!
While I have zero desire to get into the crazy situation the UK has with their ridiculous libel laws that encourage suing papers, the death of Gawker bothers me not one whit. And I think the “slippery slope!” arguments are wishful thinking. Either way, let’s find out who’s right and roll the clocks forward to see.
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I answered “yes” to most of these questions. The right to free speech is not a magic cloak that protects you from all consequences. It is limited when it conflicts with the rights of others, including the right to privacy.
The fact that Gawker did good work does not immunize them from punishment for their bad deeds. The New York Times example irks me. When the New York Times makes a mistake, at least they’re trying to do good journalism. There is no reasonable argument that Gawker thought they were doing a good deed (unless making themselves money counts) by publishing someone’s sex tape, or outing a famous billionaire, or creating a service that tracks the location of celebrities so paparazzi can stalk them (yes, this was a real thing, literally called “Gawker Stalker Maps”).
Gawker did not die because of Peter Thiel. Gawker died because, after years of attacking people who couldn’t fight back, or didn’t want the public embarrassment of doing so, somebody fought back, and won.
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The vacuum caused by the idiocy of anyone using the term makes it hard to come up with a rebuttal
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One reason I think obscene wealth is, well, obscene.
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Except in this case, the “nose” is the possibility of a free and democratic society. That doesn’t last without an investigative press.
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I’ve said before, I’m happy for people to use the term. It’s like a swastika face tattoo - a clear flag that you can ignore anything they have to say, as they really won’t be contributing anything of value.
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One newspaper isn’t democracy. One stenographer for Cheney, even less so.
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Do you feel there’s no problem then with what happened? If so, I’d be curious how you’d answer his other questions. If not, then okay. I was just curious.
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But there is “freedom of the press.” So yeah, it makes sense that the law treats the press differently.
That only means that the government can’t interfere. Freedom of the press has no relevance when you are talking about a civil suit.
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Surprised that OP, who is apparently a lawyer and a journalist, repeatedly (and apparently without irony) confuses what is “fair” with what is “just.”
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I feel the same way about anime girl avatars
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This is definitely a lesser of two evils situation. Thankfully people are willing to declare that tabloids are a bigger scourge on society than spoiled bully billionaires throwing money around to silence people.
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Ah, he’s just pissed at the Hugo results.
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