Peter Thiel had used pictures of himself shirtless on a gay cruise as his profile on some social media. To consider that his privacy was invaded because he may not have specifically said the precise words "I am gay" is disingenuous. Not to mention, courts have repeatedly held that billionaires are considered "public figures" by virtue of their "outsized influence and impact on public affairs".
There's a reason Gawker was never successfully sued by Thiel.
Gawker and Hogan _had_ also settled before Thiel got involved. Hogan had settled with the other party, the one who _sold_ the tape, for 0.02% of the claim against Gawker.
Isn't another of the tenets of a justice system the right to face your accuser, not have someone Wizard of Oz behind the scenes bankrolling things because of their own vendetta?
I can dislike Gawker (TMZ, et al) and still see huge flaws in how this all went down.
You communicated it better than I. I was somewhat horrified with the outcome because I (perhaps naively) had some belief that this tenet of the justice system had not yet been compromised. But the old adage that we have N justice systems for N wealth buckets (where N in {[rich, poor], [1%, 99%], ...}) seems to be true.
I wouldn't take back the claim, but I would chuckle a bit.
The plural of data is not necessarily a narrative. I would ask you to try again, this time without deliberately ignoring the thread and misreading it.
There is Deadspin in the Gawker portfolio which I think was a great example of the natural maturation you are talking about. The style of the site and what they covered definitely matured over the years, but that same defiant ethos stuck around until and was perhaps defined by the very the moment the entire team mass resigned in response to mismanagement. And it is interesting to note that multiple writers who resigned from Deadspin ended up at Vice.