That’s a great angle. That could be the “malice” that would have to be proven in a defamation suit IF the facts of the story also turn out to be not facts.
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It seems that the editors’ huff arrived, and they left in it.
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It’s not what one would expect the legal counsel to be telling them, no. Its not an really an admission, but it creates a very damaging perception if and when there is a lawsuit. “We stand by our editorial right to free speech by speaking the truth, and we took it down as soon as the claimant gave notice”. Either its the truth and you stand by it, in which case you wouldn’t pull it if it had actual editorial worth. Or its nothing but a hit piece and you pulled it to try and mitigate charges against you.
It would be really hard to thread the needle on that.
Gawker has editors?
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Which one is Hypocrisy Gawker?
https://foolishreporter.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/gawkermedia.jpg
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Truth is not a defense to an invasion of privacy suit.
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There’s more context to it than that. The statement from the remaining editors condemns the removal, but also notes that a good chunk of the editorial staff was against the original post. The argument from all the editors, even the ones that didn’t resign, is that an apology should have been posted, or if it was pulled it should have been the editors’ decision to do so, not the business’s.
Essentially it’s a separation of powers argument - the way the decision was made, and who made it, is as important as the actual decision.
If they had just posted an apology (like the editors wanted), the story still would be on their piss-poor judgment.
Am I missing something? I thought the dude they reported on is a prominent CEO of a major corporation and was trying to PAY FOR SEX and was cheating on his family to do it? How is that not news…even if it is just a snippet of fluff like Gawker is famous for anyway? What’s next? Suing the newspaper for printing his arrest in the police blotter?
Wait…so they got upset and righteous about the Fappening, but clearly have no qualms with trying to expose Hulk Hogan’s private sex life? WTF? It’s shit like that that allows people to claim there’s more than just “equality” going on and that there’s a real sense of people deliberately trying to give white men a comeuppance.
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What the hell does that even mean? Gawker threw a bomb into a man’s family life for no reason whatsoever. This guy wasn’t one of those closeted gays who bashes gays in public, he was just one of many closeted married gays living his life who happened to have a few bucks. Gawker gave the blackmailer anonymity but outed a private guy’s private affairs for absolutely no purpose whatsofuckingever. It was nothing more than a throwback to old-time gayshaming.
And then, rather than acknowledge error, the editors left in a huff because the owners had the audacity to try to undo a small amount of the damage. The only thing that needed to be “owned” was for the editors to own their own misconduct rather than continuing to insist they did nothing wrong.
The publication of this story was, in fact, an extraordinary, morally repulsive abuse of the discretion given to the editorial staff whose only discernible purpose was to hurt the victim and his family. The resignations are the equivalent of kids trusted with the house for a weekend getting caught torturing small animals and setting fires in the bedrooms and then becoming enraged at the breach of trust that occurred when the fires were extinguished, the animals freed and the kids grounded.
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What AJM said. In many states, revealing private details that are true about the life of a private person is actionable. Mine would not be one of those states, but then North Carolina’s courts view the adoption of new fangled legal doctrines as being the legislature’s job.
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First… I don’t see any legally actionable “invasion of privacy” angle.
CEO sent text messages to a male hooker, the male hooker can reveal the messages to the media if he wants to. Twitter or Grindr participants are not promising to keep all messages confidential. Hooker doesn’t need the CEO’s permission and neither does the media to publish what the hooker has revealed to them, presuming they are genuine. It’s like if you write a letter to someone, it belongs to them and they can show what is in that letter if they want to.
No photographs or video of the CEO have been published without his permission, no one has intruded on his property without his permission. Those are classic invasion of privacy elements that haven’t happened
Second… “invasion of privacy” is not “defamation” which is what my comment about “truth” was about.
Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, especially to those who’ve trained in the law or journalistic ethics.
You seem to confuse the ideas of invasion of privacy with copyright infringment and trespass, not “classic invasion of privacy elements” (The Shakespeare and Dickens of elements in your mind, no doubt). Courts have ruled that people have an expectation of private lives, NSA believing otherwise.
The man was not a public figure and has not been charged with anything. The messages were sent with the intention that they’d be kept private (It’s illegal in many states to record a phone conversation or private conversation without concent of both parties, which is why Linda Tripp was charged). The messages have not been substantiated. As the man is not a public figure, a public moralizer (ala a priest or Bill Cosby) or a public employee paid by taxes, he has a reasonable right to privacy unless charged with something.
In what way does this story have any value to the public, beyond giving certain types of people something to stroke off to?
I hope you don’t mind if I pass on shaking your hand.
That is legal as it’s in the public interest to know when crime is happening in thier community.
This guy wasn’t a prominent executive (he wasn’t CEO, btw). No one had ever heard of him. So unless he gets charged, there’s no legal justification to print anything about him.
Oddly, if he does sue them, it then becomes fair game to publish/broadcast.
So your argument is that they used bad judgement and violated journalistic principals before, so anything is fair game?
FAir enough. If he was nobody then yeah, it really doesn’t make sense. That’s what had me confused though: why even bother if he’s a nobody?
I have to say though…if it WAS a prominent CEO, I’d have to take the opposite side here. We’d be all over it if some prominent CEO was illegally paying (or even legally, like in NV…yuck) for breeder sex to cheat on his family. I see no reason it becomes taboo or takes on a “gay shaming” character just because the same set of facts involved him paying for gay sex to cheat on his family. In fact, in the former situation, it would go even worse for the guy because there’d be plenty of people saying shit about it being just more proof of how corrupt white male hetero society and power is…he’d be more of target and face worse criticism than the scumbag doing the paying for gay sex to cheat on his family.
No, of course not. Where did I say that? They are pretty much a trash outfit though…and yes, that matters because outfits that sling trash all day are accepted.
The point was the hypocrisy involved in waxing all righteous about the invasion of J-Law’s privacy while simultaneously refusing to obey a court order telling them to pull down Hulk Hogan’s sex video…meh, whatevs…I really shouldn’t have to explain it really. You did what is typical of the righteous in these situations: deliberately ignored the obvious point in order to attribute some nefarious other point to my comment. Hypocrisy isn’t ok just because you like the “rebalancing” it supposedly achieves.
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This has nothing to do with secretly recording someone. This has been addressed in the sexting context. Depending somewhat on the state, anything you send essentially no longer belongs to you. You don’t get to claim it was intended to be personal and private and enforce some form of confidentiality over it. You sent it. Poof. Gone with the wind. No takesee backsees.
Secretly recorded conversations are an entirely different matter and distinguishable.
And yes, I’m an attorney trained in “ethics”…altho “ethics” are irrelevant to whether there is a colorable/actionable tort claim here against either the recipient of the texts or Gawker.
The story’s value to the public has nothing to do with it either. And whether someone is a public figure or not heightens the standard for whether they can prove slander or libel against someone, not necessarily whether they have an expectation of privacy. Moreover, truth is a defense to libel/slander, so as distasteful and morally gross as publishing his intimate details was, this guy would be hard pressed to bring such a suit because what was published is apparently true. If the recipient of the texts showed Gawker his phone and the messages on it with the phone number from which they came, then yes, they’ve been substantiated.
I dunno whether you’re an attorney or not, but you’re clearly mixing and mashing disparate legal standards here.
Exactly. Destroying someone’s life for fun and profit and then whining because someone else tried to mitigate the damage is stupid and childish, as well as mean. Fact is, pulling the article does no good to the victim. The only ethical step would have been to act like editors and refuse to run such a story to begin with. But since they didn’t have the decency to refuse to participate in blackmail, they’ve got no right to feel put-upon when the people who pay them make some kind of effort to stop the bleeding.
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Who cares? There’s so Much BS “Media” out there now that you have to put on hip waders and elbow length rubber gloves before you click start your browser.
I don’t care about this story, nor do I care about the story which brought about this story.
It’s another example of the steaming piles which all too often these days take the place of real News.
America is up to the Statue of Liberty’s armpits in people who don’t know what’s going on, and don’t seem to want to know what’s going on.
Crap like this is one of the “reasons” why.
This kind of slop sustains the “low information voters” which some of us claim to be fighting all the time.