Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection. If you wan…

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker Peter Thiel

Still, the Times reporter asked, what were my own regrets? I told him, finally, that I had worked at Gawker Media for five years, and that all I could say was that nothing in that time was as shameful to me as a story the Times had put on its front page the month before, slanting the results of a st…

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker Peter Thiel

In one span of a little more than a year, not very long ago, the New York Times mistakenly accepted (and cheered for) a failed Venezuelan coup, printed falsehoods that helped carry the case for invading Iraq, and saw its top editors resign after a humiliating plagiarism scandal. No one suggested the…

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker Peter Thiel

Rather than fighting the material that he really objected to, Thiel went looking for pretexts. Over time, he came up with them.

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker Peter Thiel

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. It was solidly protected by media law and the First Amendment, as were the other posts that, as Thiel wrote, ‘attacked and m…

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker First Amendment Peter Thiel

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. It is true that Gawker was always a publication that took risks. It had bad manners and sometimes bad judgment. Occasionally, it published thin…

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker

Gawker.com is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. That is the only reason.

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker

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. By now it is conventional wisdom. That conventional wisdom is false.

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker

A lie with a billion dollars behind it is stronger than the truth. Peter Thiel has shut down Gawker.com.

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

Gawker

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