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Tommy Craggs, Gawker Media's executive editor, and Max Read, the website's editor in chief, have resigned from Gawker after the removal of a widely-panned article, a move they say represents an "indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker's business interests and the independence of its editorial staff":
At issue is a post published July 16 about a media executive who Gawker said sought a nighttime encounter with a gay porn star. The porn star, the site reported, tried to extort the executive, who is married to a woman.
The story was widely criticized because, as some people pointed out, the media executive is a private individual [and] not a public figure. Then on July 17, Gawker's Managing Partnership voted 4-2 to remove the post. Craggs and Heather Dietrick, Gawker's president who serves as the company's chief legal counsel, dissented.
Here's what Glenn Greenwald had to say about Gawker's story:
The story had no purpose other than to reveal that the male, married-to-a-woman Chief Financial Officer of a magazine company – basically an executive accountant – hired a male escort. When the escort discovered the real-life identity of his prospective client – he's the brother of a former top Obama official – he began blackmailing the CFO by threatening to expose him unless he used his political connections to help the escort in a housing discrimination case he had against a former landlord. Gawker completed the final step of the blackmail plot by publishing the text messages between the two and investigating and confirming the identity of the client, all while protecting the identity of the blackmailing escort.
[...] The reasons for regarding the story as deeply repugnant are self-evident. The CFO they outed is not a public figure. Even if he were, the revelation has zero public interest: it's not as though he's preached against gay rights or any form of sexual behavior. It's just humiliating someone and trying to destroy his life for fun, for its own sake. By publishing the article, Gawker aided the escort's blackmail plot, arguably even becoming a partner in it. Even worse, the story (probably unwittingly) reeks of all-too-familiar homophobic shaming: it's supposed to be humiliating at least in part because he's a man hiring a "gay porn star," as Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read put it as he promoted the "scoop." The escort's identity has been confirmed by others and he seems to have a history of serious mental distress, which Gawker is clearly exploiting. Beyond all that, Gawker has an ongoing war with Reddit, owned by the magazine company for which the CFO works, which suggests this is part of some petty, vindictive drive for vengeance, with the CFO as collateral damage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:46AM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:48AM
Ask the first post anon what's interesting.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:59AM
Seems like the smell of shit excites her/him... So, who am I to judge? Whatever float her/his boat, I still don't need to like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:09AM
It's about ethics in journalism.
Forget the Gamergate lookalike framing because in this case it actually is about ethics. Gawker contributed and enabled blackmail, for absolutely no good reason other than..... well.... the guy worked for Reddit? Yeah no, that's not a good enough reason at all. And it's not some gay hatin' pastor or gay bashin politician who got outed either - at least on those two you could claim some sort of legitimate public interest angle. A finance person with no known history of hating gays? Sorry, this is not a legitimate journalism target - and add in the blackmail angle, it should not have been touched.
I bet the GamerGate lot are having a absolute field day with this one.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by mojo chan on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:38AM
To be absolutely clear, GamerGate is going to claim that this is evidence that they are doing some good, but it's not. It's just evidence that they will use anything to cover their campaign of hatred and harassment, no matter how loosely related to the original "ethics in gaming journalism" claim. They just use it to legitimize their cause. It's all well documented in their own IRC logs, or just hop over to 8chan right now and read the discussion in real-time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:54AM
Can people please stop with that IRC logs meme. You are talking about screenshots taken, without context, from the anon shitposting HQ of the internet.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:16PM
No, I mean the full text logs, which you can download here: https://archive.moe/v/thread/261343810/#261347271 [archive.moe]
They were captured and released independently by GamerGaters, hoping that the vast volume of information would be too much for anyone to handle (a classic document dump). Apparently they forgot about grep... You can can see everything they said, in context, no redactions or missing data. Try searching for "zoe" or "anita", for example.
This is an incredibly valuable historical document. Rarely do we get to see inside these kinds of campaigns so clearly. All the sock puppetry, the fake #NotYourSheild campaign, the admissions that it's got nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with harassing women, it's all there.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:40AM
Gamergate was always about ethics, no matter how much people might want to pretend otherwise, it was always about ethics. I keep hearing people claim that there were other motives to it, but I've yet to see them point to anybody that's actually a supporter. Mostly it's a few people that weren't involved and are quickly denounced by Gamergate supporters.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:25PM
Which ethics, exactly, were being defended by this kind of behavior:
- Spouting off what turned out to be totally fabricated stories about some guy's ex?
- Criminally threatening to rape and murder people because of something they posted on the Internet?
- Criminally threatening at least one terrorist attack on an event where one of the targets had planned on speaking?
- Making false police reports (also a crime) that cause innocent people's homes to be attacked by SWAT (which could easily have gotten somebody killed)?
All that over what turned out to be a demonstrably false claim that a single game creator slept with a single game reviewer to get a favorable review.
What's particularly silly about it is that not a single gaming publication has had honest reviews of anything in decades - the game companies are the primary source of advertising revenue for the publication, so there's an extremely strong financial incentive to give good reviews to bad games. That phenomenon goes back to at least the days of the NES.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:23PM
Citations badly needed. Nobody in the movement was calling for anybody to be raped. And every time that allegation has shown up it's been denounced. But, people like you seem to be convinced that it's something that we've approved of. And, no I don't approve of that.
Again, nobody in the movement was threatening terrorism, and I'll denounce it again. As far as the false police reports go, again, that wasn't us, and I'll denounce that here. Those are trolls and or false-flags. People insist that it's something to do with the movement, and it's not. It's a distraction that the "media" was using to try and distract from the obviously questionable activiites.
So, the fact that we were just then sick and tired of all the bullshit makes it silly? It wasn't just questionable reviews, you had games being judged by people with a connection to some of the developers that had entries. And you had outlets that were declaring gamers to be dead and running all sorts of lies in order to try and get people to ignore how corrupt they were.
But no, I'm sure fabricated stories by the people trying to redirect focus are completely accurate and it's a completely innocent coincidence that they ran similar stories about gamers being dead at the same time.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:51PM
RationalWiki [rationalwiki.org] has an excellent rehashing of the timeline and a detailed refutation of your claim that it had nothing to do with rape and murder and terrorism. While you individually might not be supportive of any of the calls to rape and murder and terrorize people, GamerGate absolutely had people doing exactly that, and GamerGate as a whole did not support the various law enforcement investigations that came out of those activities. This all was well-documented by numerous reputable news organizations at the time, including the Washington Post and New York Times.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:21PM
The editor on that page was permanently banned from wikipedia. Not the greatest source of info.
(Score: 2) by Francis on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:32PM
Rationalwiki? Are you seriously linking to that garbage. They're just as bad as the people they're debunking. I don't think that an obvious propaganda piece qualifies as a citation. If you read the thing, there's no effort of any sort to be objective.
It's not just that I didn't do it, it's that nobody did. There were a small number of trolls with little or no connection to the movement using it as a chance to engage in trolling. I have yet to see any actual evidence that it was actual supporters of it. What's more, Anita deliberately inflames tensions wherever possible so she can more easily raise funds for her projects. It doesn't make it right that people were threatening her, but I can't see how it's that serious to her if she continues to deliberately inflame tensions.
So yeah, people keep claiming that GG is some sort of evil conspiracy that hates women and eats puppies and whatever other BS they've concocted.
(Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Wednesday July 22 2015, @04:28PM
As a person who saw Gamergate unfold first hand - not through the extremely detached blogs of journalists - I am not in the least bit surprised to see Wizardchan not mentioned a single time in that entire "Rational Wiki" article. Critical information is being actively withheld from you and everyone who reads that timeline. You will never see a first-hand source of what went on there. Only self-referencing articles fed by biased information via the "Telephone" game of Twitter.
And a friendly reminder - you can't turn in a grade school science project with "Wiki-anything" as a source. Are you interested in seeing first-hand rather than second-hand sources? Examples of corruption directly from the people who are being accused of it? Feel free to check out this link (and the linked first-hand sources within it) on one of the "Innocent" "journalists" (separate emphasies, there) whom the first Gamergate-targeted woman was having an affair with. Ignoring everything to do with that clusterfuck of arguing past each-other with accusations of "slut-shaming," "misogyny," etc., because even if those are valid complaints, the journalist involved remains demonstrably corrupt, but because the narrative continues to be focused on the women, nothing is done about his corruption. That is what perpetuates the conflict.
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson#509 [deepfreeze.it]
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday July 22 2015, @07:30AM
"Nobody in the movement"
No True Scotsman [wikipedia.org], eh?