9 ms·

Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy. By building an entire business model around such practices, Gawker is not only spreading disinformat

• calbear81 10y ago
  Can you cite any examples of libel and slander that have been published by Gawker?
• smt88 10y ago
  > Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy One man's libel/slander is another man's investigate journalism ("muckraking" in the US). In this particular case, Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false. > it shouldn't take a billionaire to sue and win judgement against slanderous publishers It's actually much harder to win a libel/slander suit as a public figure. See: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/libel-defamation http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/libel-defamation
  • pmichaud 10y ago
    I don't think that poster is talking about Hogan.
  • taejo 10y ago
    Your comment exposed me to the big gap between the meanings of muckraker in US and UK English: 1. (US) One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons. 2. (Britain) A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.
    • smt88 10y ago
      Interesting! I'm going to change my language from "muckraking" to "investigative journalism". Thanks for pointing this out.
    • idlewords 10y ago
      The term was coined as a perjorative (by Teddy Roosevelt) and then co-opted as a term of honor by the journalists he was attacking.
      • davidmr 10y ago
        At least in my schooling, Upton Sinclair was held up as the very model of a muckraker, and he was certainly anything but (2) above. Perhaps sensationalist on occasion, but strongly principled.
        • idlewords 10y ago
          Roosevelt was applying the term to journalists at publications like McClure's. There's a great book about this period by Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit) that I can't recommend highly enough.
    • hoorayimhelping 10y ago
      I'm American and I've only heard a muckraker described as number 2.
      • smt88 10y ago
        ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sources, describes some of their articles as "muckreads". They use the word proudly, with the implication that they've gone to lengths that the general public would/could not to find out important information. As someone said, it was a pejorative term that was reclaimed, and that makes a lot of sense to me now.
        • johnpowell 10y ago
  • cjahsh 10y ago
    Ah yes, society should recognize the positive impacts of investigative journalism. I can hardly see a between the Pentagon Papers and a sex tape!
    • smt88 10y ago
      What if a conservative politician lobbies for adultery being illegal, and then a sex tape emerges of him cheating on his wife? That's important journalism. What if the CEO of a company intimidates an employee into having sex with him and secretly films it, and that gets released? That's also important journalism. There are lots of other ways sex tapes could be newsworthy: a famous person makes racist comments in it (the Hogan tape!), a Hollywood director asks for sex in exchange for a role, etc. etc.
      • anarazel 10y ago
        But that's not gawkers business, so ... ?
      • cjahsh 10y ago
        Are all sex tapes journalism? Including revenge porn?
      • slg 10y ago
        There is a difference between reporting on the existence of a sex tape and publishing said tape. None of the examples you gave require the tape to be published.
        • throw10010110 10y ago
          None of their examples are even valid. In Hogan's case, this was a consensual act. The fetish is called wifesharing, and the wife testified that it was consensual among all parties. The number of people who are calling this cheating, immoral, etc is sort of terrifying. This is equivalent to a gay couple being caught a century ago, and everyone arguing that it's in the public's interest to know. It's not. It's consensual and harms no one. The sole argument that could be leveled against this is that the husband secretly recorded the act. This isn't good, but "Husband secretly records consensual act" is none of our business. By the way, if someone would vouch my comment (the same way you'd flag a comment, but click "vouch" instead of "flag"), I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
  • slg 10y ago
    Does that really change the underlying belief? Whether what Gawker did was libel, an invasion of privacy, or any other crime it boils down to Gawker violating the rights of other individuals and building a business model around that practice. This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
    • smt88 10y ago
      > This wasn't some brave investigative journalist exposing corruption, this was a hack posting the sex tape of a celebrity. I agree, but the reason Gawker lost is important. It was because they violated someone's privacy. I strongly support violating the privacy of powerful, public figures in the future if it serves public interest. I agree that Gawker was stupid, greedy, and overreaching here, but I still worry that next time, the sex tape (or whatever it is) will be equally private but much more important to the public.
      • slg 10y ago
        > but I still worry that next time... People are acting like their is no thought put into these type of court cases. This isn't a universal precedent that applies to every situation. It doesn't prevent any journalist from pursuing legitimate news stories and invading privacy along the way. It only prevents journalist from invading someone's privacy where the only story is the invasion itself.
        • untog 10y ago
          Huh? That's not true at all. A billionaire could fund cases against a media company entirely irrespective of the merit of those cases - the media company would still be forced to pay the legal fees associated with defending themselves, even if it's as simple as just getting it thrown out of court. Do it enough times and you've bankrupted the company. For an example, Mother Jones was brought to the brink of bankruptcy for reporting an entirely true and legitimate story: http://m.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit http://m.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersl...
  • sheepleherd 10y ago
    | Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false. ...not to mention, Hogan's public persona and living he has earned has been by posing as a larger than life clownish character; I don't even see that he was harmed. Ask yourself, do you think less of Hogan now? (and not because it turns out that he has less impressive sounding real name) I'd have more sympathy for a "normal" person.
    • saint_fiasco 10y ago
      Hogan can't eat our positive thoughts. He lost a lot of respect among the kind of people that (economically) matter a lot to him, like sponsors and employers.
      • blastrat 10y ago
        I get the idea of what you said, but did he, really measurably? plus: the information released about him was accurate; who says you get to have secrets that disqualify you from jobs that you hide from your employer? I'm not saying we want to have a big brother society, but I am saying if you present yourself as wholesome (whatever that means) and you are not wholesome, then you are false advertising anyway, to people who care about that. Anyway maybe it made him relevant again ("there is no such thing as bad PR"), I had forgotten he existed. Need to wait for some time to go by before it's clear. I'm not advocating a side or devil's advocating, i just prefer the "less outraged middle" over the "outraged extremes"
    • kofejnik 10y ago
      Jennifer Lawrence's persona and living are based on being extremely attractive, so was it Ok to hack her iCloud and publish her nude selfies? Strangely, Gawker crowd was very upset that no one went to jail for it.
      • blastrat 10y ago
        I'm not saying Gawker is OK or not, nor that they are hypcocrites or not. I'm talking about the standards that courts use to measure "harm". Young starlets have so many sex tapes (their own and hacked) out there, and it doesn't seem to harm them much. It's almost as if a porn star could make a better claim that they lost the commercial potential of something stolen! Again, I'm not saying that I want to live in a world where it's ok to steal people's sex tapes and put them out there; but I am also noting that in today's world, it is much less of a "harm" or even an embarrassment to people than it was when the system of torts was established. Since torts are based on harm, we run into the issue of "how much harm did this cause?" maybe it needs to be made illegal like "upskirts". (and I'm not advocating that, either. I'm saying, I'd like some clarity to exactly what people are outraged by)
• qq66 10y ago
  One possible solution is the constitutional right to an attorney in civil cases as well as in criminal, but I don't know how you'd protect that against abuse.
  • zo1 10y ago
    Why do you need an attorney at all? Perhaps that is the question we should be asking. Rather than figuring out how to give one to everyone for free, and then protecting it against abuse.
    • CaptSpify 10y ago
      Because laws are complicated and hard? there's a reason attorney's typically make decent money
  • cookiecaper 10y ago
    Yes, I believe our system should be amended to ensure that roughly equal resources are available to both parties. The court should require an accounting of all legal fees to be filed. In certain cases, the wealthier party to the litigation should be obliged to pay an amount of money equal to their own expenditures on legal fees into a trust run by the court, which would ensure the less-wealthy party gets equally-solid representation and would prevent a lot of the bullying-by-lawsuit that goes on. Far fewer ridiculous bluffs will come out of international firms like Skadden or MTO when their client knows that they're also going to need to forward that $1,000/hr to the party they're threatening. Would Donald Trump have sued the journalist who published a piece estimating his true net worth if this was in place?
    • CM30 10y ago
      How about a differet system? Both parties pay into a pot based on how much money they have. Then the only legal advice can they take is set by random rather than by anyone's choice, out of roughly equal quality legal teams paid for by the money from the pot? Just make it so money cannot buy better lawyers or legal advice, and the court system would be made far fairer to everyone.
• olliej 10y ago
  And engadget and kotaku and most of the other tech related websites you probably read. Also its a good lesson to other sites to police content to ensure no one says anything bad about billionaires. Thank god for thiel protecting us from horrible things like censorship!
  • viggity 10y ago
    they didn't say anything bad about Thiel, the reason he went after them is because they outted him as gay.
    • notcotsotrot 10y ago
      Incorrect, that's his sub-excuse. The actual reason is because of Valleywag reporting on e.g. his embarrassing failure of a hedge fund.
      • trsohmers 10y ago
        Failure of a hedge fund during the worldwide financial crash, out of which he started two new investment entities (Thiel Capital and Mithril) which are alive and well. I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
      • trsohmers 10y ago
        Failure of a hedge fund during the worldwide financial crash, out of which he started two new investment entities (Thiel Capital and Mithril) which are alive and well. I can't understand why people are so upset about a third party paying legal expenses... what do you think the ACLU, EFF, and tons of other organizations and private citizens (either in individual or collective form) do? A jury (impartial to Thiel and unaware of his involvement) found Gawker and Nick Denton personally guilty. Denton himself is worth over $100 million (Gawker itself was valued according to reports to the court at $80 million, so he has plenty of assets outside Gawker), so this isn't a story of a big financier ganging up on a "little guy" that people are trying to make it out to be.
• will_brown 10y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842051
• lotso 10y ago
  The Hogan lawsuit has nothing to do with libel or slander.
  • idlewords 10y ago
    Keep the facts out of this!
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• bkeroack 10y ago
  False. Statements must be untrue to be either libel (written) or slander (verbal). The sex tape in question was real. I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed. (It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.)
  • jlarocco 10y ago
    You are definitely correct that Gawker's behavior wasn't technically illegal, but it was still a shitty thing to do, so I have zero sympathy for them. > I would not be so quick to celebrate. This case has demonstrated that one or two very powerful, wealthy individuals (Peter Thiel et al) are able to destroy a successful business and ruin the livlihoods of dozens merely because they were embarassed. That's always been true anyway. On the bright side, this time it was all over the internet, so that's some kind of progress at least. > (It's worth noting that what Gawker originally wrote about Thiel was also apparently true.) In both cases the info Gawker published was really nobody's business but that of the people involved. They published it as shameful attempts to get page views and (possibly) just to be mean. So good riddance.
    • deong 10y ago
      You don't have to have sympathy for them to want this not to have happened. I don't like Gawker. If you want to argue the world is a better place without them, I'm not going to take the other side. But the way they've been destroyed is terrifying for anyone who wants to live in a free and informed society. The ends don't justify the means.
      • jlarocco 10y ago
        I agree with you, and my point was that the ultra-rich influencing the media isn't new, and is actually more visible in this case than it normally is.
  • k-mcgrady 10y ago
• deong 10y ago
  Ironically, unlike Gawker's reporting, your comment actually is libelous.
• curiousgal 10y ago
  They're not bankrupt due to libel and slander. They're bankrupt for sharing stories that many people believe should be better left in private. The specific stories that got them here, regarding Hulk Hogan and before that Peter Thiel, are not libel or slander, as they both involve true information. The issue is whether publishing these things is an invasion of privacy that damages the individuals involved. Much as you might hate Gawker, and I definitely think their practices of outing people for no reason and publishing sex tapes are morally and ethically shitty, what this really shows is that if you piss a billionaire off, they can and likely will silence you. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
• maxxxxx 10y ago
  I wonder if you could sue some of the creators of political ads. I would love to see them bankrupt.
• manish_gill 10y ago
  > Libel and slander have no place in a functioning democracy. You seem to not understand what freedom of speech means. As someone who actually lives in a place where people use libel and slander laws to sue people left and right and get offended, consequence being censorships and a tightening of restrictions on speech, I'd kill to have the kind of freedom Gawker did.
  • gwildor 10y ago
    Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/