Inside the Delightful Suicide of Gawker

[EasyAce]

Good riddance
By Kyle Smith
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449061/nobody-speak-review-gawker-death-no-tragedy-free-speech

In the history of giving a hostage to fortune, John Cook, a former editor of the former online poison party
known as Gawker, merits a special place. He has this to say about his professional aims: “I wanted to write true
things about bad people . . . being bad or obnoxious or cruel or unkind.” When enemies had been so identified,
he says, “We could give ’em ‘what fer.’”

Unkind! Gawker saying its mission is to make war with the unkind is like the Queen of England decrying nepotism.
Gawker’s very escutcheon was cruelty, obnoxiousness, unkindness. It published stories too nasty and sleazy for
tabloids, and wrote them up with sophomoric zeal for vulgarism and profanity. I happily worked at tabloids for
many years, but I felt ashamed of myself every time I read Gawker. I can hardly imagine what it must have been
like actually to work at such a flatulence farm, a scum ranch, an academy of pus.

Still, Gawker had every right to publish. Until it didn’t. Everything it did was protected by the First Amendment.
Almost. The flame merchants set fire to themselves when Gawker published, without the permission of either
participant, a surreptitiously recorded sex tape that depicted the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea)
and the wife of his friend in flagrante. With his legal team secretly funded by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and
billionaire Peter Thiel — whom Gawker had “outed” in 2007, and who rightly considered killing Gawker to be a
public service or perhaps an act of hygiene — Hogan sued Gawker and its founder Nick Denton into bankruptcy.
Now Gawker is no more, having lived its surly life like a candle in the wind, or rather like a blowtorch that was
incinerated by a much larger blowtorch . . .

. . . As for the First Amendment, it doesn’t extend into Hulk Hogan’s bedroom unless his actions there are newsworthy.
Just because someone sends you a sex tape doesn’t give you the right to publish it. “Chilling effect”? No, merely the
establishment of a very bright, clear line: Don’t publish people’s sex videos without permission.

Gawker was just about the only press outlet that would consider doing such a thing in the first place. Now it’s gone,
and freedom of the press carries on.

Gawker . . . the Confidential of the Internet age.

[jmyrlefuller]

Gawker . . . the Confidential of the Internet age.

While Hogan, like Liberace before him, cried all the way to the bank.