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Gawker article outs a private citizen

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by TopSpin, Jul 16, 2015.

  1. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Would love to hear the phone call from Geithner's lawyer to Gawker.
     
  2. Elliotte Friedman

    Elliotte Friedman Moderator Staff Member

    I can't believe people are defending this at all. The debate about Geithner being a public figure is a total red herring. Who cares if he's a public figure or not? He's getting blackmailed!

    This freaking guy is blackmailing him...and Gawker bought it because it's in a fight with Conde Nast over Reddit or whatever. I recognize not everyone here is a journalist, but based on what we read in that story, if it came to you, would you print it or broadcast it or put it online? Oh, and who exactly would be getting the benefit of the doubt, plus the anonymity?

    Come on.

    I'm not a Gawker hater. Like every other media site, there's great work and there's misses. This is a colossal mistake.
     
  3. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    As I said earlier, I think Geithner has somewhat
    of a public profile, but no way I support Gawker on this.
    It's Gotcha Publishing just for the sake of causing trouble.
     
  4. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    If I was on the legal team defending Gawker, I would be scouring the internet to see if this guy ever used his status as brother to one of Obama's aides to benefit himself in a public forum. That would be a massive reach for a straw, but it's about all that they would have.
     
  5. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    No one here would print it, no matter how "high-minded" they present themselves here. The story is gutter nonsense, the product of a web site clearly striving to generate traffic and put food on the table in the midst of rough times. Desperation erodes ethics and decision making. It's instructive.
     
    Lugnuts and murphyc like this.
  6. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    Tommy Craggs, the executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, are resigning from the company. In letters sent today, Craggs and Read informed staff members that the managing partnership’s vote to remove a controversial post about the CFO of Condé Nast—a unprecedented act endorsed by zero editorial employees—represented an indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker’s business interests and the independence of its editorial staff. Under those conditions, Craggs and Read wrote, they could not possibly guarantee Gawker’s editorial integrity.

    Tommy Craggs and Max Read are Resigning from Gawker
     
  7. murphyc

    murphyc Well-Known Member

    Not sure if you meant gutter or utter nonsense, but both work. Once they started posting the back-and-forth internal "battle" it really smelled like a ploy to gain views and attention. I think you could make a pretty good argument generating traffic was at least part of the motivation for the original story, but by now it has just gotten pathetic.
     
  8. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    For all his martyrdom under the flag of separating business from editorial, Craggs should never have put the publication's partners or himself in that position and he was given ample opportunity to pull down the post himself. He exercised piss-poor judgement, even for Gawker, and he's paying the price for it. The rest is bullshit.
     
    murphyc and Webster like this.
  9. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Never once have I seen Craggs exhibit maturity above that of a middle-schooler.
     
  10. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    Resigning from the one place that will have you is pretty stupid. Hope Craggs likes humping it as a freelance writer for the next 30-odd years of his career, because there's no way he'd be hired to manage other people after this massive, double-down error in judgment. He should have just admitted the mistake of running the story in the first place and moved on. Who, other than some of the sorry sacks he gave platforms to at Gawker, will defend his actions here?

    It's odd that people don't seem to be making a bigger deal out of the fact that Denton is gay and that the story was about outing a gay man. That had to be an aggravating factor, because Denton seemingly has no scruples when it comes to harming other people's lives.
     
  11. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Great saying by the Khmer Rouge applies to Craggs's entire existence at Gawker: "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss".
    Take your "principled act" and shove it, Tommy.
     
  12. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Too weird to live, too rare to die.
     
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