Gawker.com will officially be shut down after being bought out by Univision.

Gawker founder Nick Denton. AP.

Beleaguered gossip site Gawker.com will be officially shut down after being bought out by Univision for $135 million. LA Times. The site had been in operation for 14 years. Univision did not provide a reason as to why it was being shut down but many thought that Gawker could not be rehabilitated after the bad press from the Hulk Hogan lawsuit. Hogan sued Gawker for $140 million after they published a sex tape staring him. His lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel, a millionaire who had been outed as gay back in 2007. Gawker's other properties, including Gizmodo and Kotaku will likely survive the buyout. Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, has gone bankrupt due to the lawsuit. 

My Comment:

Before I say anything else... 

Since that is out of the way, let's talk about this. I've written about Gakwer in the past. They have always been a terrible company of gossips and scandalmongers posing as 'journalists" with nothing in the way of ethics or professionalism. They are a terrible company and the only bad news is that some of their properties, notably Kotaku, aren't being shut down as well. 

So what has Gawker done that is so bad? Well let's start with the sex tapes. They had no problem with posting sex tapes for people like Hulk Hogan or other men. But when a bunch of hacked female celebrity photos leaked they called anyone that looked at them "sexual predators" and even "rapists". They were massive hypocrites. 

How else were they hypocrites? Well Paul Denton is gay. He's supposed to be a progressive liberal who supports gay rights and other gay people. But what he did to Peter Thiel shows that he does nothing of the sort. Outing a gay person isn't news, especially if that person is a private citizen. And Thiel wasn't their only victim. They also "outed" David Geithner, brother of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. David was a private citizen and I put "outed" in quotes because the "evidence" was just a bunch of easily doctored texts and the rantings of a crazy person. 

Gawker was also a major player in the Gamergate scandal of a couple of years ago. The whole thing was a mess but Gawker and their staff did a lot to fan the flames. They insulted everyone that had ever played a video game and called everyone that disagreed with them misogynists. Sam Biddle, even went so far as to say that bullying should make a comeback because of the scandal. Indeed Gawker lost a lot of money to the scandal after video game fans contacted their advertisers and got a large number of them to pull their adds. It may have left them weak enough that Hogan's lawsuit was able to finally kill them. 

Gawker was also made up of unapologetic leftists. They made no secret of their political affiliation and did everything they could to make conservatives look bad. They are far leftists and they believe that anyone to the right of them, even other liberals, are sexist, racist and bigoted, regardless of the facts. That's fairly standard for news media these days but at least other outlets pretend to be objective. Gawker didn't even try. 

Some people in the media are whining that Hulk Hogan lawsuit was an affront to the 1st amendment. (Not that Gawker cares about the constitution. They published the names and addresses of New York gun owners so they clearly don't care about the 2nd amendment). I completely disagree. Libel and slander laws exist for a reason. You can't make up things for no reason and you can't just post things that invade people's privacy. There was no benefit for letting people watch a clip of Hulk Hogan having sex. Nobody gains anything by that. 

Given how biased and disgusting the media is right now, I hope that Gawker's fate will be remembered. I want journalists to thing about things like ethics and lawsuits when they are deciding to publish something. Given what they are saying about the GOP this year, I don't think it has set in yet, but I think people will be more willing to sue the media when they make things up out of whole cloth or post gossip with no news value. Even unsuccessful lawsuits can hurt news outlets like Gawker. 

I hope that other news outlets go the way of Gakwer. So many of them right now are just making things up, implying things that never happened. or even out and out lying. The worst thing is that people are still buying it up. I mean, even after everything that happened, people were still reading Gawker. As people keep buying what the media is selling, literally and figuratively, nothing will change, even if Gakwer has gone down in flames...