The willingness to publish things too ugly for other outlets to touch-an account of seeing video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack, domestic-violence accusations against Bill O’Reilly-had gone over to destructive irresponsibility, and we were being punished for it.

The natural conclusion, even for people on the inside, was that the company must have taken too many risks. The business model on which it had thrived-writing things that people were interested in reading, and selling ads to reach those readers-was foundering due to a whole new class of expenses. Suddenly the company had exhausted the limits of its insurance and was bleeding money on legal fees. Hogan’s first two attempts to pursue it, in federal court, went nowhere, with judges ruling that the publication was newsworthy and protected. This was the kind of case that, in the normal course of things, would have gone away. Among those was Hulk Hogan’s complaint against Gawker for having written about a sex video he appeared in, and for publishing brief excerpts of that video. Gawker found itself attracting legal threats and lawsuits at an unprecedented rate. So rather than fighting the material that he really objected to, Thiel went looking for pretexts. Hurting rich people’s feelings is, in principle, not a punishable offense. It was solidly protected by media law and the First Amendment, as were the other posts that, as Thiel wrote, “attacked and mocked people”-specifically, his cohort of rising plutocrats in Silicon Valley. The change begins with the post about Thiel’s sexual identity in a homophobic investor culture, the post Thiel now cites as the inspiration for his decision to destroy Gawker. What Thiel’s covert campaign against Gawker did was to invisibly change the terms of the risk calculation. In Gawker’s wildest, most buccaneering years, it never came close to paying a million dollars for crossing a line. Lawsuits and settlements happen to everyone, and everyone carries insurance to handle them. The Post was denounced, as it deserved to be, for callously crossing the line, and it ended up settling a defamation lawsuit. The New York Post was so eager for a scoop on the Boston Marathon bombing that it put a photo of two innocent men on its front page, after law enforcement had already declared that they were not suspects. Occasionally, it published things that it would regret-just as, for instance, the New York Times has published things that it regrets.īut every publication gives itself room to make mistakes, and is prepared to absorb the damage when it does make a mistake. It had bad manners and sometimes bad judgment. It is true that Gawker was always a publication that took risks. The strange and embarrassing thing about being the target of a conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, is that it undermines one’s own understanding of the world.

is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. The message is that Gawker had this coming, that the site was-to some degree, depending on how sympathetic the writer is trying to pose as being-responsible for its own downfall. Gawker was, the Styles section wrote, “a place where too many of the articles published were not only mean but inconsequential.” “Gawker’s take-no-prisoners approach has.been to its detriment,” the business section reported. You could get it directly from the Times’ own reporters in the news pages. The Times didn’t really need to give Thiel the space in the opinion section to tell his story of the wages of recklessness. The premise behind that morality play was, as Thiel wrote in space given him by the New York Times last week, that “cruelty and recklessness were intrinsic parts of Gawker’s business model.” The $140 million judgment that his lawyers secured for Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media, sending the company into a bankruptcy from which its flagship site would not emerge, was a matter of “proving that there are consequences for violating privacy.” This is the final act in what Thiel wished to present, and succeeded in presenting, as a simple and ancient morality play, a story of hubris meeting its punishment. A lie with a billion dollars behind it is stronger than the truth.

Gawker sued out of business