Regular readers of this blog know that I focus a lot on what I call the “information environment,” and its immense effect on our politics and government. I particularly worry about the increasingly fragmented nature of that environment, and the ability the Internet offers to occupy a “reality” of our individual choosing.
It isn’t only the proliferation of what we might call “alternative fact” sources, and the ease of accessing them. The so-called “legacy media” hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory. Respectable outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times have–for one reason or another (Jeff Bezos or ??) normalized the distinctly abnormal demented and deteriorating President. The recent rise of alternative sources like Substack has included some excellent truth-tellers, but most Americans lack the time, interest or background information needed to seek them out.
To call the present overall media environment unsatisfactory–to point out that the absence of truth-telling journalism endangers democratic decision-making–does not seem an overstatement.
Given the reality of all this, I was intrigued by a recent essay by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo (which is one of the reliable and perceptive alternative sources available.) That essay attributed much of the currently unsatisfactory nature of our media to Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which the essay called “a seminal event prefiguring and laying the groundwork for much of what has happened in the last decade.”
The facts are simple. Hogan was a tabloid celebrity. Gawker published a tape of him having sex with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. At the time, as Marshall wrote, “It was hard to take seriously that this was a righteous fight for the First Amendment…. publishing someone’s sex tape struck me as reckless, difficult to justify in journalistic terms and frankly hard to defend.”
Hogan got a $140 million judgement…. Without $140 million, Gawker couldn’t appeal. The company and its owner, Denton, were forced into bankruptcy. And that was the end of Gawker and its stable of sites. Some of those — Jezebel, Gizmodo, Deadspin, even the Gawker site proper (Gawker Inc. was the company that owned all these sites) have had post-bankruptcy zombie existences. But basically that was it.
That lawsuit was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.
It turned out that Hogan himself was the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel who funded the entire litigation. Hogan himself must have been a wealthy man but the bills of a major libel suit is a very iffy investment. Denton had suspected that someone was footing the bill behind the scenes — perhaps even Thiel. Money seemed like no object in how the lawsuit proceeded. Thiel took all those worries and risks away. Thiel held a grudge over Gawker’s past negative coverage of him and had been plotting its destruction behind the scenes. Thiel’s use of Hogan presaged the current world of billionaire lawsuits in which limitless money can overcome the weakness of meritless litigation. (See the recent Times story on how Elon Musk and MAGA attorneys general have brought Media Matters to its knees.) The rich have always put their wealth on the scales of justice. But Thiel’s actions opened new terrain, as did the explosion of billionaire wealth taking shape at the same time…
Gawker wasn’t damaged. It was destroyed. It ceased to exist. For what was essentially pocket change, Thiel got his revenge. In that one suit, you can see the evil vapors of Trumpism and its oligarchic billionaire milieu congealing into solid matter for everything that was to come. In so doing, Harder and Thiel radically raised the stakes for all journalism in the United States. The combination of billionaire money, novel legal theories, venue shopping and quirks of civil litigation at the state level (the fact that Gawker was prevented from appealing a judgement that never would have survived appeal) changed everything that goes through a publisher’s mind when they click the publish button.
It’s the new Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules…and sets the narrative…
Another well researched and useful article, Sheila! While Thiel has been written anout and exposed for his responsibilities in supporting, promoting and protecting Trump, he has still managed to remain somewhat unnoticed by the media and the public. Perhaps that’s because he is like a viper who slithers along unnoticed and then strikes with deadly poison when it’s least expected. He is definitely one of the evil Trump cult members.
Friday I went to a Bay Resistance organized Protest of Thiel- Billonaire’s Control outside his Founder’sFund office in San San Francisco. Excellent speakers- “well organized “ – would welcomed More- specifically- Seeking to Get 20-40 of us to stay after 60 minutes of speeches and chants- to meet- discuss How our varied groups can Escalate Resistance- brainstorm, network etc
For myself, the total loss of trust in the Washington Pose hit the hardest. Seeing the picture of Bezos as one of Trump’s three personal billionaires at his indoor, private inauguration sickened me. That seat cost Bezos and the Washington Post much more than the massive donation to Trump late in the campaign.
If you can find it, maybe on Netflix, the movie “The Post” starring Meryl Streep as Kathryn Graham (owner of the Post) and Tom Hanks as Ed Bradlee (editor) and their release of the Pentagon Papers prior to their bringing down Nixon and the White House by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein presents what the 2nd Amendment is supposed to protect. Loss of trust can never be recovered and our nation now has few sources to trust for truth in journalism in any form.
MEA CULPA. MY BAD, BIG OOPS!!! Of course it is the 1st Amendment that protects the press. My morning coffee hasn’t reached my brain cells yet, please forgive my poor editing.
I believe the story that angered Thiel was one of his “kept lovers” who committed suicide by falling off a high balcony because they both showed up to the same party. Thiel invited his male lover, and his male husband had a blowup and forced Thiel to break up with him, which he did. Absolutely no one believed that this fitness professional committed suicide.
And yes, Thiel funded the Gawker lawsuit to put them out of business. Period.
I could go over all the TV legacy news spending cash on Trump and firing their top anchors because of Trump’s thin skin. As I’ve said for years, you can’t trust legacy media, and now its trust is below 10%. I blew up the Gannett-owned Star Press because their government reporters had to write positive spin for the local oligarchy, who kept them afloat. (Ball Family)
And Sheila is precisely correct, now you have to hunt for news that the average person has the time or desire to seek out. Sadly, many are on X.com and I read their response to Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview with is nothing but a PR stunt to set up Trump’s pardon of her.
Actually, a few of the victims have broken their silence to say that Ghislaine was 100x worse than Jeffrey. She was the hunter and the skinner.
When a subject arises, and all the stories fly on legacy media and the companies that are given to so-called “independent news,” it’s hard to sift through all the bullshit. For those seeking the truth, who immediately sit down in their La-Z-Boy chair with a remote, are receiving propaganda, almost without exception. Even those with a laptop have to know who is accurate or who is sharing propaganda. As Sheila wrote, that rules out the average American who prefers one news channel on TV or those who get memes from Facebook.
For Americans, the first obstacle is ignorance, and the second is a tie between time and will. This presents a problem since it fits the masses.
The oligarchy knows who the masses are, and those who are basically informed. The truth seekers are such a minority; the oligarchy knows they are just tiny voices. Hitler eliminated them with the Jews for a reason.
I would say that the most incredible stories of the past decade are outstanding models for the flow of information and how the government lies, and so does the “press”, as seen in WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, coupled with Edward Snowden.
Another great story right now is the Epstein/Maxwell cover-up in prime time. Also, how did George Bush convince all the “legacy news” of WMDs?
nuff said. but that rise of wealth is contained in wall streets walls. tilt the justice scale? the damn thing is broken. the rich have used social media as a tool, not a fun place to enjoy viable knowlege. seems few people under stand right from wrong,good and bad and the lack of protecting our democracy from this. im standing outside the fence avoiding social media. i dont app nothing.and in return, im reading many news journals and opinions, and find there is a voice,but im willin to take the time to understand and stay ahead of the noise.
the noise where the protectors are being trounced and kicked by the no voice protaganist.whereas, money (the rich)buys stupid with cheap trinkets and influencers selling it. some one is financing this and it aint cheap baby..
trumps isnt the issue,hes just the noise and the last signature to the blow were getting ready for. its now a billionaire congress and its money enforced..
and we see what this congress and money can do. ice, local gov takeovers,internment to deport camps, masked law enforcement,etc. all this is in our face intimidation.. the next election may take place,if stupid doesnt opt for marshall law,and shuting down the only voice we have.
I watched an interview with Mr Thiel explaining the antichrist and the other day on another platform someone said he was going to give a lecture series on the antichrist . I don’t know if the lecture series is a real event but the video appeared to be .
Theil’s orange haired buddy is the closest thing to a mythical antichrist.
Todd is right about the laziness of our fellow citizens, and how too many are more than happy to be fed BS.
Never bothering with newspaper/magazine “gossip” stuff I was unaware of the Hogan affair thing, and its broader impact, knew nothing about any related legal issue, until reading about it here. Ironic!
Bezos is not a journalist, to say the least about him, and his ownership of a major newspaper is actually an affront to “Truth and the American way.”
I am reading an article directly from Curtis Yarvin, the Tech Bro’s philosopher, who mentors others like Vance, in a sort of pyramid scheme. Trump couldn’t understand a single word of Yarvin, but Vance is a true believer.
The subject of the article is “philanthropy.” So far, I’m behind him in what he is saying, but I will need to reread it because he talks about soft power. He is currently talking about my community, precisely, and Indianapolis as well.
He makes a statement that contains a Latin phrase I wasn’t familiar with:
“Outsiders—habitual, congenital, or both—are all too prone to the pernicious myth of “vox populi, vox dei.” This democratic fallacy, so universal in our decaying time, generates lucrative, fallible, forgettable, useless slop. As with porn, anyone who works a day of his life in any such slop factory will forever reek of it.”
“Vox populi, vox dei” means “the voice of the people is the voice of God”.
It suggests that the opinions and desires of the majority of people are divinely inspired or inherently correct, according to some sources. However, it’s also been used to express the opposite view, that the voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_populi#:~:text=Vox%20populi%20(/%CB%8Cv%C9%92,p%CA%8A.
I believe that Yuval Noah Harari is a significant voice for our times.
He has written about our information-saturated society and the roles of fiction and non-fiction in thinking.
To use a term typically associated with Artificial Intelligence, humans are large language models. We think by telling stories to ourselves, and each word in our stories recalls an experience by which we learned the meaning of that word. Our subconscious remembers some details from all of our senses, not only of the moment we first discovered the word, but also of all the moments that added more nuance to the meaning.
Perhaps what we label intelligence is the range of experiences we have had and how well nuanced they have brought us in our language model.
Another sign of intelligence is our ability to reliably classify fiction from non-fiction and our ability to apply the most effective understanding of the differences.
No matter how much time we invest in experiential learning, we can only approach the capabilities of our lot in life as a single nervous system, which pales in comparison to human knowledge, which dwarfs us all.
It’s that human knowledge that ultimately defines and limits the capability of AI.
What will hardware and software with potentially flawless recall of all of our knowledge properly classified between fiction and non-fiction be like as a tool for flawed individuals like all of us?
We will gain insight into that shortly.
So, Gawker’s right to free speech should have won the appeal over Hogan’s claim to right to privacy? Back in the day they called that “hitting below the belt”! To capitalize on and cause harm to a citizen’s reputation doesn’t seem just. The negative effects of mass sensationalism about personal indiscretions are harmful and should be considered.
On the other hand, if Potus was implicated in a sex trafficking ring (pedophilia) since he’s the top law enforcer (his words) the public has the right to know.