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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the sad-Fourth-Estate-of-affairs dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:38PM

    by penguinoid (5331) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:38PM (#212113)

    Why is it OK for a rich guy to commit a crime?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

    Prostitution in the United States is illegal, except in some rural counties of the state of Nevada.

    Why is it OK for a rich guy to have an affair (compare to public opinion on the threatened release of that affair's site information)? Is it because he's gay?

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  • (Score: 2) by Kell on Wednesday July 22 2015, @03:15AM

    by Kell (292) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @03:15AM (#212170)

    Except that having an affair or using an escort service are not the same thing as prostitution, and there is no evidence that he did anything illegal or intended to. In most countries there is a supposition of innocence until guilt is proven.

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