The Daily Beast’s Olympic dating app stunt is deplorable

There’s a lot of garbage that gets published on the internet these days, given the fact that anyone able to publish anything at any time they want so long as they have an internet connection.

But the Daily Beast’s piece on Olympic athletes using dating apps in the athletes’ village is downright deplorable, a different kind of garbage that never should have seen the light of day to begin with.

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, a straight, married with kids writer went on several dating and hookup apps including Grindr and Jack’d, which are focused towards gay men, in the Olympic village for the purpose of…well, I’m not sure what the purpose was here or what writer Nico Hines was trying to accomplish other than telling the world that young, physically fit people like to hook up with one another.

Shocking.

There’s no journalistic value in doing this whatsoever. Anyone with even a 3rd grade education could tell you that. So, what was the point of this piece, other than producing a bit of clickbait and offering readers a glimpse behind the curtain into what their favorite athletes’ personal lives might look like?

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has an excellent takedown of the piece here that I agree completely with on all fronts, from his point about Hines misleading the very people he is writing about to the disturbing fact that Hines unwittingly outed several of the athletes he wrote about. Reading Hines’ piece left me feeling enraged not just because the piece was, to put it lightly, awful but also at the fact that an editor approved it to begin with.

A person’s sexuality and marital status are their business. Period. End of story. If they want to share that deeply personal information with you, fine, that’s their business because it’s their story, not yours. Making yourself an unwanted interloper into a complete stranger’s romantic life regardless of what that person does for a living is unacceptable, especially if it’s done in the name of “journalism.”

As a single person who has, myself, used dating apps in the past, Hines’ piece represented the manifestation of a sort of worst case scenario.

You match with a person who you think is legitimately interested in you only to find out that not only who are they not who they say they are, but they’re working on a project of some sort. Can you imagine how you’d feel if that happened to you? I’m mortified just thinking about it.

Coming up with a fresh twist on an event that reporters from around the world are intensely covering is challenging. That being said, there are literally a million other stories in Rio that Hines and the Daily Beast could’ve told that would’ve added something to the world’s Olympics conversation beyond “Olympic athletes like to hook up and whoa, some of them are gay too!”