It’s not even about whether they should have been made to defend that decision in court, and if found to have gone beyond bounds, paid a price.
GAWKER SUED BY INSURANCE PRO
This is not about whether Gawker should have published a pro wrestler’s sex tape. When these men, and they are mostly men, are willing to go nuclear, there’s very little in the institutions of democracy that can stop them. (Gawker’s $6.7 million or so in profit is derived in good part from links to Amazon shopping pages.) But they also come from powerful people to whom the cost of company-bankrupting litigation is pocket change. The threats come in part from the balance sheet: newsrooms don’t make money. But “journalism” is a very small subsegment of that big “media industry”-and journalism is more vulnerable than it’s ever been. And that may be true, if you define “media” as everything from Netflix and HBO to Univision and Disney. Here’s the thing: Most people think of “the media” as very powerful. Thiel’s personal fortune is estimated at $2.7 billion, and-as evidenced by the outpouring of Silicon Valley sympathy for his crusade-he carries quite a bit of weight among his fellow tech titans. Gawker Media is not an insignificant player, but it’s a $250-million company at best, in an industry with razor-thin margins. In truth, the Thiel-Gawker fight is more like US vs. Deterrence, at the height of the Cold War, meant building a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons to make sure the other side never used theirs.
Now, deterrence can mean many things, but for those-like Thiel, and the two of us-who came of age in the ’80s, it carries a specific resonance. Thiel said he’s had it in for Gawker ever since 2007, when the site ran a (fairly flattering) article headlined “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People”, and that he sought out “victims” of its reporting with a goal of “specific deterrence” against media companies. Peter Thiel-the founder of PayPal, pledged Trump delegate, and occasional skeptic of women’s suffrage- bankrolled a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that pushed Gawker Media into filing for bankruptcy protection last week.
GAWKER SUED BY INSURANCE FREE
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.īy now, you know the contours of the latest OMG moment in Journalism vs.
0 kommentar(er)
