Post by The Ultimate Nullifier on Jun 1, 2016 9:47:11 GMT -6
www.f4wonline.com/daily-updates/daily-update-goldberg-wwe-enzo-cass-espn-ricochet-vs-ospreay-213726
Not everyone is standing with Hulk Hogan and the anti-Gawker group. Here’s an NYT op-ed from someone that is with Gawker.
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/opinion/i-stand-with-gawker.html?_r=1
Gawker Smeared Me, and Yet I Stand With It
I HAVE been attacked pretty much my entire career by Gawker. I made its list of “least important writers” twice, and it put me in 62nd place on its “worst 100 white men” list, which also included Judas Iscariot and Joe Paterno. Gawker writers have called me a “terrible writer” and a “terrible sexist” and insinuated that my wife wants to stab me.
I thought things might be changing last year, when Gawker’s managing editor and founder, Nick Denton, sent me a surprisingly complimentary email about a piece I wrote for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He ended up holding a book party for me where I met and joked with all the Gawker writers who had publicly insulted me. But it didn’t stop the attacks. Just a month ago its sister site Jezebel wrote a parody of an article I wrote for The Guardian about misogyny in which they called me “Brosephine Baker” (which is, O.K., pretty funny).
Such childish hostility notwithstanding, I believe that Gawker serves an essential function in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and if it were to disappear the world would be poorer and the cause of journalistic truth would be damaged. In its struggle against the billionaire Peter Thiel — who, it turns out, secretly funded Hulk Hogan’s privacy lawsuit against the website, resulting in a $140 million jury award — Gawker deserves more support than it is getting.
Gawker is new media, but it possesses an old-fashioned sensibility that dates from the 18th century. The editors and writers want power to be made uncomfortable whether or not it deserves the discomfort, and they believe that the public right to information is more important than any individual’s right to privacy. I would say, to anyone who believes that Gawker is just the gutter press, that those values are worth something even in the gutter.
The distaste Gawker provokes is largely a result of the world it inhabits and reflects. Gawker is responding to an asymmetry of celebrity power, and the way that celebrities like Bill Cosby, Jimmy Savile, Jian Ghomeshi and Woody Allen, to name a few, become immune to the pressures of civil society.
Whether Gawker should have posted the Hulk Hogan sex tape I will leave to the care of finer souls than mine. I will say this: No one could possibly object if that were the tape of a congressman. But even a pathetic D-lister like Hulk Hogan has more power to shape the world today than most congressmen. The world we live in has made a presidential nominee out of a reality television star. This is the world that Gawker predicted and took up arms against.
Gawker’s best articles, like Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm,” or the reporting on Rob Ford that scooped every newspaper in Canada, or the recent investigation into Donald Trump’s hair, are directly in opposition to the triumph of celebrity culture. Every traditional media outlet should envy that work. If you think it’s beneath you, all I can say is it’s not beneath the American people.
I have seen journalists I respect claim that Gawker’s brand of journalism is cruel and hence “good riddance.” I understand this point of view. Gawker’s outing of Mr. Thiel as gay was cruel. On a lesser scale, the attacks on me always seemed as if the writers were talking about a fictional creation named “Stephen Marche.” In their eyes, because I was a columnist at Esquire, I must therefore be a younger, lousier version of Norman Mailer. It bothered me that they never caught the actual mistakes that I made. They weren’t reading me closely enough to hate me for what I deserved to be hated for.
But we are all living in a world in which the quality of sentences in a book matters less than the collar of the shirt you’re wearing on the back cover. Gawker reflected that change; it didn’t make it.
Mr. Thiel meanwhile seems to want a world in which he, personally, encounters no resistance, whether it comes from government or the free press or anyone else for that matter. He has declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he is on the board at Facebook. The new breed of technologists who are taking control of the news media do not feel they should pay taxes or submit to regulation or offer anything more than disruption to their employees. They need to be challenged. And Gawker, at least, has challenged them.
Mr. Thiel is the most famous student of René Girard, the celebrated professor of philosophy at Stanford who developed the concept of the scapegoat mechanism. We blame others for our own sins and overcome that impulse only through “mimetic desire” — through mediation with other people. Mr. Thiel has turned Gawker into a scapegoat for the shifting world of celebrity culture that we all inhabit. He has made Gawker into a scapegoat for the world he himself is helping to create.
Not everyone is standing with Hulk Hogan and the anti-Gawker group. Here’s an NYT op-ed from someone that is with Gawker.
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/opinion/i-stand-with-gawker.html?_r=1
Gawker Smeared Me, and Yet I Stand With It
I HAVE been attacked pretty much my entire career by Gawker. I made its list of “least important writers” twice, and it put me in 62nd place on its “worst 100 white men” list, which also included Judas Iscariot and Joe Paterno. Gawker writers have called me a “terrible writer” and a “terrible sexist” and insinuated that my wife wants to stab me.
I thought things might be changing last year, when Gawker’s managing editor and founder, Nick Denton, sent me a surprisingly complimentary email about a piece I wrote for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He ended up holding a book party for me where I met and joked with all the Gawker writers who had publicly insulted me. But it didn’t stop the attacks. Just a month ago its sister site Jezebel wrote a parody of an article I wrote for The Guardian about misogyny in which they called me “Brosephine Baker” (which is, O.K., pretty funny).
Such childish hostility notwithstanding, I believe that Gawker serves an essential function in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and if it were to disappear the world would be poorer and the cause of journalistic truth would be damaged. In its struggle against the billionaire Peter Thiel — who, it turns out, secretly funded Hulk Hogan’s privacy lawsuit against the website, resulting in a $140 million jury award — Gawker deserves more support than it is getting.
Gawker is new media, but it possesses an old-fashioned sensibility that dates from the 18th century. The editors and writers want power to be made uncomfortable whether or not it deserves the discomfort, and they believe that the public right to information is more important than any individual’s right to privacy. I would say, to anyone who believes that Gawker is just the gutter press, that those values are worth something even in the gutter.
The distaste Gawker provokes is largely a result of the world it inhabits and reflects. Gawker is responding to an asymmetry of celebrity power, and the way that celebrities like Bill Cosby, Jimmy Savile, Jian Ghomeshi and Woody Allen, to name a few, become immune to the pressures of civil society.
Whether Gawker should have posted the Hulk Hogan sex tape I will leave to the care of finer souls than mine. I will say this: No one could possibly object if that were the tape of a congressman. But even a pathetic D-lister like Hulk Hogan has more power to shape the world today than most congressmen. The world we live in has made a presidential nominee out of a reality television star. This is the world that Gawker predicted and took up arms against.
Gawker’s best articles, like Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm,” or the reporting on Rob Ford that scooped every newspaper in Canada, or the recent investigation into Donald Trump’s hair, are directly in opposition to the triumph of celebrity culture. Every traditional media outlet should envy that work. If you think it’s beneath you, all I can say is it’s not beneath the American people.
I have seen journalists I respect claim that Gawker’s brand of journalism is cruel and hence “good riddance.” I understand this point of view. Gawker’s outing of Mr. Thiel as gay was cruel. On a lesser scale, the attacks on me always seemed as if the writers were talking about a fictional creation named “Stephen Marche.” In their eyes, because I was a columnist at Esquire, I must therefore be a younger, lousier version of Norman Mailer. It bothered me that they never caught the actual mistakes that I made. They weren’t reading me closely enough to hate me for what I deserved to be hated for.
But we are all living in a world in which the quality of sentences in a book matters less than the collar of the shirt you’re wearing on the back cover. Gawker reflected that change; it didn’t make it.
Mr. Thiel meanwhile seems to want a world in which he, personally, encounters no resistance, whether it comes from government or the free press or anyone else for that matter. He has declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he is on the board at Facebook. The new breed of technologists who are taking control of the news media do not feel they should pay taxes or submit to regulation or offer anything more than disruption to their employees. They need to be challenged. And Gawker, at least, has challenged them.
Mr. Thiel is the most famous student of René Girard, the celebrated professor of philosophy at Stanford who developed the concept of the scapegoat mechanism. We blame others for our own sins and overcome that impulse only through “mimetic desire” — through mediation with other people. Mr. Thiel has turned Gawker into a scapegoat for the shifting world of celebrity culture that we all inhabit. He has made Gawker into a scapegoat for the world he himself is helping to create.