The stories about Gawker’s investigative prowess were probably more marketing than anything else. As Thiel said to me (and he admitted it was histrionic, but there’s an element of truth in it), “What does it say about a media outlet that is supposedly dedicated to investigative journalism that it can’t investigate a conspiracy that’s happening to it in the present moment?” The final post on Gawker is “How It Works.” The running theme of the whole site-the way that they justified their existence-was that they were the truth-tellers, they said the things that other people were afraid to say, they dug into the sordid details that other people were afraid to dig into. You are very critical of Gawker for not recognizing the conspiracy that it was facing. ” But then as a thinker-philosopher type he thought, “I have the resources to do something about this. Its similar to how we were all optimistic about WikiLeaks but WikiLeaks has been corrupted by foreign governments, right? Thiel’s fear as a powerful person was: “What could these people do to me? What exposure do I have to the vulnerabilities this presents? A rumor could take Facebook stock down or something about my personal life could be. Gawker was dangerous because they would act like what they were doing was about transparency or truth, but was really subject to their own biases and their own manipulations. The reason they don’t stop and think about publishing the Hulk Hogan tape is that their job is just to publish things, not to ask about the source of the information. One of the things that Gawker did that I think was particularly reckless was that it was indifferent to that agenda. One of the things that he writes that has always stuck with me is something like, “Journalists are dependent on sources and sources are inherently self-interested.” So whether you’re talking to The New York Times or if you’re reading a random piece of gossip about a celebrity, someone’s always got an agenda. regular people?Įdward Jay Epstein wrote a book in the 1970s about journalism that I found fascinating. Do you think that could have been because the site, to some extent, democratized rumor-that it wasn’t stockbrokers or political powerbrokers spreading rumors in media but. But Thiel seemed to be fixated on Gawker. In business journalism, people who are trying to, say, short stocks often try to spread rumors. Much of what we know about the inner workings of the Trump administration is rumor.
Rumor plays a big role in political journalism and business journalism. If this does have a chilling effect on media, which critics says that it does, that is still validating that hypothesis, which is that this guy thought there should be and he fucking did it, which is just insane. When I marvel at what happened, I think we’re all responding to the same thing, which is that this guy really did crank the wheel.
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