Very little about Gawker being dead is terrifying.

Whether a billionaire used his money to file lawsuits that ultimately exposed a POS media organization for what it was (a POS), is more or less immaterial. Why? Because lawsuits ≠ automatic victory. The lawsuit(s) have to have some legitimate merit to them in order to pass the litmus test with judges and juries. Unless you can prove they were paid off or something analogous. Then we’d have a problem.

And while I have no delusions about the number of morons serving on juries in this country (which by the way, is directly caused by non-morons refusing to do their civic duty, because they can’t be bothered with something as mundane as jury duty), and wouldn’t want my life in their hands, when it comes to things like the first amendment and media law, juries tend to be more able to handle the responsibility. That is, they can sift through the BS and find the gems much more easily in a media context than a murder context because there’s less emotion involved and the law is more easily applied. Plus, who is more intimately familiar with everything media than Americans?

Bottom line, Gawker got stomped because the judge and jury felt there was merit / cause to do so. Good f-ing riddance. Internet signal:noise just got the proverbial bump in the right direction.

If this starts happening to legitimate news publications, I’ll start worrying. More worrying to me are the billionaires not shutting down media but buying them all up.