3/30/2023 0 Comments Gawker worthThis is where we’d theoretically need the media, an arbiter to make sense of a complicated topic like whether a popular drug might or might not have some benefit in mitigating the effects of a novel virus. I mean the royal media You, the You we are depending on to tell us what Ivermectin actually does and does not do. And by “you,” I don’t necessarily mean the reader. On Twitter, bluechecks keep instructing you to reduce thousands of words or entire careers down to “bad” or “stupid” or “grifter” or whatever, and eventually you get pretty dumb. Remember when people tried to know about things? Lolz.Īnd so this play gets run into the ground, again and again. Bad people were talking and that’s really all you needed to know. Many would rather get a little dopamine hit off reading a charge like, “BIGOT REVIEWS BIGOT.” And what was said in that carefully crafted review? Were there interesting ideas there, concepts one could agree or disagree with? Doesn’t matter. Few consumers have the time to sift through every pundit’s nuances, so the Shrink Man is here to give you CliffsNotes.ĬliffsNotes are sort of boring though. My friends in tech hate journalists, viewing them as stupid wreckers, but I’d counter that it takes some aptitude to immiserate the current masters of the universe.Įven some of the less clever Shrink Mans can work because they fit a market need for brevity within a world that’s flooded with information. Many of its practitioners are quite smart, and they’re frequently clever about trimming a foe’s flabbily nuanced statement into a punchily embarrassing Onion-style headline. It’s basically simple lying, nothing fancy. It’s effective, to a degree, but it’s a blunt instrument. You’re in a presidential debate and your opponent says you want to execute every dog in town and by gum, he’s against that sort of thing. What is the Shrink Man? Well, it’s a bit like a straw man, but devoted to stigmatized summation. And it’s, in part, the language of Shrink Man. Beyond media, it’s completely embedded itself into the general Twitter patois. Like how Atatürk’s radical purging of Arabic and Persian words in 1928 changed Turkish for everyone, Gawker speak is a totalizing lingo in media. You can’t possibly expect Gawker to escape itself, when no other major online publication has been able to shed that influence. Now, Gawker is back, as is The Defector, a subscription site set up by some Gawker alumni. Gawker chased the dragon right off a cliff while social media networks kept pumping out Gawker-inspired salacious content, consequence free. Twitter and Reddit and a dozen other social networks and hosting platforms have out-Gawkered Gawker in their low thresholds for publishing and disregard for traditional standards, and, even more important, they distribute liability. Whether by accident or intent, Twitter became the ideal place for Gawker’s pithy style, and so Twitter overtook its forefather while inspiring that forefather to take untenable risks. Ya, I don’t think Gawker can reform, even if its old/new editor Leah Finnegan is disavowing her “terrorist” past and declaring, “I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives.” Even if there was a concerted effort from on high to not indulge in old excesses, there’s a simple, inescapable issue: New Gawker operates in a landscape that Old Gawker created. "Gawker Media Group is putting its properties up for sale after a coordinated barrage of lawsuits intended to put the company out of business and deter its writers from offering critical coverage.Over the weekend, Ben Smith, a good value add for the New York Times, did a profile on the new Gawker titled, “ If Gawker Is Nice, Is It Still Gawker? ” The weekend had hardly ended before we got an answer to that question in the form of a new Gawker headline about a friend ’s article, titled, “ BIGOT REVIEWS BIGOT FOR NYT BOOK REVIEW. "The sale and filing are intended to preserve the value of GMG's pioneering digital news business, safeguard the jobs of journalists and other staff, and allow GMG to fund the appeal against the $130 million judgment in the Hulk Hogan case," the company said in a statement. Read More from CNBC: Billionaire Peter Thiel Financed Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker Years earlier, a Gawker publication outed Thiel as gay. Late last month, it was revealed that tech billionaire Peter Thiel helped to bankroll Bollea's legal costs. The jury later added $25 million in punitive damages. The filing came about three months weeks after a Florida jury slapped Gawker with a $115 million judgment in an invasion of privacy lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, for publishing a tape showing him having sex with the wife of a friend.
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