In court, Hogan's lawyers sought to portray Gawker as an organization without a moral compass. It wasn't a hard argument to make. During one deposition, Hogan's lawyers asked a former Gawker editor if there were any situation in which a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy.
As a result, arguments about media freedom fell on deaf ears in the jury box. Jurors didn't buy arguments that the First Amendment protected Gawker's right to humiliate random celebrities by publishing video of their most intimate moments. Gawker isn't the only publication to be targeted by a disgruntled billionaire. Last year, the liberal magazine Mother Jones defeated a defamation lawsuit filed by Republican donor Frank VanderSloot. If VanderSloot's goal was to punish Mother Jones for writing an accurate but unflattering story about him, a loss was almost as good as a victory.
So "winning" the lawsuit cost Mother Jones and its insurance company 30 times as much as the amount they would have had to pay if they had lost. What was really ominous was what happened after VanderSloot's loss.
As far as I know, no one has taken him up on the offer. But the threat to freedom of the press is obvious. Any news organization doing its job is going to make some enemies. If a wealthy third party is willing to bankroll lawsuits by anyone with a grudge, and defending each case costs millions of dollars, the organization could get driven out of business even if it wins every single lawsuit. Thiel insists that he has no quarrel with news organizations that conform to mainstream journalistic norms.
But the key thing about his strategy is that he didn't sue Gawker for outing him — a case he probably would have lost. Instead, he waited for years until he could find other plaintiffs with stronger cases.
That's a tactic that any billionaire could use against any news organization. And because most news organizations cover a wide variety of topics, the story that provoked a billionaire's ire might have nothing to do with the stories that actually trigger a lawsuit funded by that billionaire. In short, Thiel's war on Gawker could become a template for other extremely wealthy people with personal or ideological scores to settle against news organizations.
At its peak, it had perhaps ninety-five regular readers. I felt sufficient obligation to my regulars to post nearly every day. But the real high came when a rare stranger stumbled onto my blog and left a comment. In the golden age of personal blogs—a phrase that makes me feel incredibly old to type—the motivating factor, I think, was the possibility of making a connection with strangers based on nothing but your words. In , the computer scientist J. Licklider imagined a proto-Internet where people communicated over networked computers.
But the drive to connect with as big an audience as one could was self-generated, at least in my case. Page views only gave you a sense of whether you were succeeding. How did I do? I do recall one post from that first night, because I had spent some time before my shift researching it.
I wanted to be a reporter as much as a blogger. As of this writing, it has fifty-six hundred views, which, if I had written it toward the end of my Gawker career, would have been deeply disappointing. Whatever—it was good enough to get the job. I worked at Gawker for four years, walking the tightrope. The immediacy of publishing encouraged me to be extremely sure of arguments and facts and to write things I truly believed, since I had nobody to fall back on but myself. And, in order to find an audience, I had to be entertaining and provocative.
At its worst, it led to gratuitous meanness and a bad lack of self-awareness. And jurors sided with Hogan, who shed tears in the courtroom when the verdict came down. The verdict was widely interpreted as a perceptible shift in how the public and juries view privacy rights.
Five years on, freedom of speech is, if anything, more contentious. It may again be up to Gawker to find out where the lines are currently drawn. Bustle has said the new editor of Gawker is Leah Finnegan, who had worked at Gawker for one year as a writer and features editor before taking a buyout in July Teen Vogue names Danielle Kwateng as new executive editor.
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