Gawker is known for gleefully piling onto controversy and have its writers add their own snarky two cents to a story, but the past couple of weeks have seen Gawker become the story.
In the middle of July, Gawker published a post about an executive named David Geithner at media company Conde Nast backing out of paying a gay porn star/escort to spend the night with him in a hotel. When the escort realized who Geithner was, he tried to get his help with an alleged discrimination case he’s involved in, threatening to go to the media if Geithner didn’t help. Geithner got spooked and backed out of the deal, and the escort then went to Gawker with his story.
In the media, it’s considered ethical to out a public figure only if there’s a gap between his sexual identity and his public persona – for example, if a politician rails against gay people but is later found to have hired a gay escort, that exposes hypocrisy and is newsworthy. An executive famous for nothing and who has rarely been mentioned online before this hiring an escort? That’s not newsworthy and in fact is just Gawker grasping at anything it can to get clicks.
The story as printed was not about an escort trying to get revenge on a media executive for not using his power to help someone he barely knows with a situation he has no idea is legitimate. The story was, “Ha ha, this guy is gay and cheating on his wife!” (Former) Gawker editor-in-chief, Max Read defended the decision to run the story, by tweeting, “Given the chance, Gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies f***ing around on their wives.”
Except here’s the thing: Gawker has no idea if this guy was actually cheating. It’s one thing to expose a public figure who demeans gay people – it’s almost certain that if he’s found with an escort, he’s cheating on his wife. But there could be many explanations for Geithner: maybe he and his wife have an open relationship and she sleeps with other people as well. Maybe he and his wife are separated. Maybe his wife has given him permission to have affairs on business trips as long as she doesn’t have to hear about them. Maybe his wife has encouraged experimentation. Maybe you don’t agree with these hypothetical reasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that Gawker had no idea what was going on in this man’s mind and marriage when he made the decision to solicit an escort. Mother Jones reports that the story was written, edited, and vetted over only one day – a tiny amount of time considering all the possible consequences of publication.
In the aftermath of publication, Gawker’s management team voted 4-2 to retract the story. Editorial was heavily against not having a say in the retraction, and after the decision, executive editor Tommy Craggs and editor-in-chief Max Read quit, both releasing heavily snarky memos as befitting Gawker staff members. The problem with the memos is that neither even once considered that maybe posting a story about some nobody hiring a gay escort was wrong. Craggs spent most of his memo whining about management’s handling of the vote to retract the post, also publishing text messages with Gawker partnership that make him look noble and them look bad. It’s actually kind of amazing to read their long-winded memo and see no mention at all, not even offhandedly, that they were wrong to publish the post. Read defends it by saying it fits in with Gawker’s history of reporting on the sex lives of powerful media figures. Only as stated above, those stories are only newsworthy if they show a gap between what the figure says and does, which it didn’t in this case.
Gawker’s not exactly hard journalism, but they do have a moral responsibility to not take down people who are just trying to go about their lives without bothering other people.
