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hellotheretoday | 7 months ago

It’s an everyone sucks here situation. Gawker was undeniably shitty for outing thiel and posting a sex tape of hogan and then refusing to take it down. But the impact of the lawsuit was basically that if a billionaire has a vendetta against your media org they can fund a lawsuit even if they are in no way involved. And it’s rumored that Thiel funded several suits, not just hogans, discreetly. Even with hogans he was challenged but was allowed to keep funneling cash to take gawker down

The end result of that is that media orgs are now far more cautious about posting “exposes” of powerful people. Gonzo journalism in America is basically dead except for a handful of independent outlets that have much less impact, funding, and reach. Now it’s substacks of people that used to work for the intercept and rolling stone because media with money is playing it safe posting articles about trumps latest antics and 12 vacation spots you have to check out before you die.

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phil21|7 months ago

It's not an everyone sucks situation. A relatively powerful organization well known for playing bully finally picked on someone who happened to be stronger than they anticipated and got what was coming to them.

It's not like they decided to fess up and play nice once they were caught red handed. They decided to double down and act even shittier in court thinking they were still the big bad bullies and finding out the hard way courts don't really like that sort of attitude.

Absolutely no one would be taking Gawkers side here if the victims happened to be more sympathetic. The facts of this case were pretty one sided, as shown by the win in a notoriously difficult to win sort of case. The behavior of Gawker in court was absurd on top of it all.

If this were a case of a SLAPP lawsuit or burying them in legal costs over a series of marginal cases I would agree. It was not. It was simply one of their victims finding the means to finally stand up to an organization that abused it power consistently and with malice. The bully found out the hard way they weren't the biggest bully on the block, and refused to back down.

Nothing of value was lost. Very little of what Gawker was doing was in the public interest. It was life-ruining clickbait at it's worst.

pwdisswordfishz|7 months ago

> But the impact of the lawsuit was basically that if a billionaire has a vendetta against your media org they can fund a lawsuit even if they are in no way involved.

How is that different from what was before?

kotaKat|7 months ago

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delfinom|7 months ago

Please GMG went to shit when they switched to pushing out absolute click bait trash. And that's driven by how dead traditional website ads are. Only medium with viable ad revenue has been videos for a long time.

Otherwise most of those sites werent anything they needed protection from billionaires besides Gawker. Kotaku was supposed to be a gaming site but instead became an opinionated rag piece that rivals the NYPost.

It was all for the eyeballs chasing whatever pennies are left in website ads.