![]() Similarly, Gawker doesn’t just look to expose malfeasance in the public interest but to humiliate, degrade and ruin its targets, newsworthy or not, and regardless of whether its subjects’ behavior causes harm. Thiel isn’t so much seeking to recover specific or punitive damages, even, in this case, on Hogan’s behalf - Thiel says he’s getting nothing himself - but rather to employ the costs and the burdens of limitless litigation as a way to put Gawker out of business, or to force its sale. The antagonists are matched in another way: Each is out to inflict the maximum pain on the other. Both sides are beyond the bounds of predictable behavior. Gawker’s mass audience and unrestrained passion for personal assassination and Thiel’s hyper wealth are both new cultural phenomena. ![]() But Thiel found a work around.Įqually, Gawker has found its own way around many of the constraints and conventions of publishing, helping to create and being protected by a new ethos, and tsunami, of scabrous, unverified and unfiltered Internet comment. Plaintiffs are checked by the cost of this kind of litigation if they are not rich, and by further exposure and scrutiny if they are. Publications are checked by the right of people to sue. In this, Thiel exempted himself from the natural checks and balances of the process. Instead, he provided the financial wherewithal for someone else, wrestler and reality TV star Hulk Hogan, to sue Gawker - and, in a Florida court in March, to win a $140 million judgment. The real issue here is Thiel’s method - his subterfuge. It’s anybody’s right to sue a media organization for its mistakes and behavior and the damages it might have caused. It’s about an individual’s recourse against the press. It’s not about governmental interference with the press, which is what the right to free speech protects against. In fact, this is not precisely a free speech issue. Journalists tend to believe that any defense of free speech is a defense of their reason for being, and, as well, of their jobs. ![]() But they would be, of course (while a few have been abused by Gawker, most have not). My Twitter feed is predictably overpopulated with liberal journalists who are, to a person, shocked and appalled at what Thiel is doing. ![]()
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