Gawker is dead, and that is terrifying

I keep a few emails from my days as a prominent-within-my-niche blogger that remind me of the good work we did back in the days when blogging was a thing and independent citizen journalists did good work; before “blogs” became just a vertical on an establishment media outlet’s website. This is one of those emails. It was forwarded to me by a friend in the White House who wanted me to know a particular piece of my work was appreciated by the White House Press Secretary.

The piece was a takedown of Gawker, and man was it a beaut. Gawker had written an irresponsible and inaccurate hit piece directed at a mid-level civil servant implying corruption and cronyism because the writer hadn’t done enough homework to learn that a benefit the subject received was the result of serving in Afghanistan with the State Department. My clap back was brutal. The archives of that blog no longer exist, but trust it was on an Ether-level of savage. I wrote an attack that was the lexical equivalent of the guy in a 60s kung-fu flick, jumping off walls and kicking in the faces of several dozen opponents without encountering a scratch.

I tell this story to establish my bonafides as whatever the antonym is for “fanboy” when it comes to Gawker.

You’ve no doubt already read the plethora of “Gawker did both shitty things and great journalism” hot takes over the past week. I’m not going to rehash that.

What I will say is this: when a media outlet does something shitty, including publishing the kind of truly offensive nonsense that we’ve seen at Gawker over the years, they can and should be held accountable and that may even mean they get driven out of business.

But that’s not what happened to Gawker.

Gawker is dead today because they embarrassed a multi-billionaire and that multi-billionaire decided on his own Gawker should die. He used unlimited resources to bankroll lawsuit-after-lawsuit against an independent media outlet until he found one that stuck (after that same suit had been repeatedly dismissed by other courts), and found a venue where a judge would rule in his favor and not allow a stay for the defendant to file a constitutionally entitled appeal, an appeal that Gawker probably would have won. A multi-billionaire decided Gawker could not live, and from the moment he came to that conclusion Gawker was already dead.

There is an argument to be made, and I might agree with it, that the piece that embarrassed that multi-billionaire was repugnant. You could even argue that after all of the irresponsible things Gawker has posted over the years, they got their due.

But you can’t make those arguments without considering that a multi-billionaire who might be our next President goes through lawsuits like kleenex while banning journalists and outlets he doesn’t like from covering his campaign and has even threatened to jail journalists who write negative stories about him. The First Amendment is critical to the survival of our republic, and we now very clearly live in a world where you only receive its protections if you can afford them. A man who could be our President cops to an intention to use that paradigm as a weapon against dessent.

Say what you will about Gawker’s conduct over the years. But waking up this morning in a world without Gawker truly terrifies me.