Gawker and David Geithner

PBDWake

Member
SoSH Member
May 1, 2008
3,686
Peabody, MA
Well, this one blew up. For those who haven't been following along, last night Gawker posted an extensive piece on David Geithner, brother of former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Among the details in the article are the following: [assume the word allegedly is attached to everything]
  • Geithner, a married father of 3, solicited sex with a male escort and gay porn star
  • He paid "Ryan" (an pseudnym and the primary source for this article) $2500 in cash, as well as covering plane fare and hotel expenses to meet him in Chicago for a tryst
  • Numerous examples of texts and pictures (including a selfie of "David", the first-name-only name that Geithner used) shared
  • A fedex package with a return address supposedly traceable back to a Geithner family home in Louisiana that contained the $2500 and tickets
  • That "Ryan", on figuring out who Geithner was, became determined to blackmail Geithner into helping him with a housing dispute through his connections to the president
  • That when Geithner either could or would not produce aid, that Ryan became determined to out him
This whole thing, as you can imagine, caused a shitshow in both social and traditional media circles, and very little of the criticism involved David Geithner. Some of the outrage was directed at "Ryan", an escort who is cashing in on a wealthy client's identity because his attempt to blackmail him fell through. Most of the criticism is heading to Gawker media, for what people believe to be a poorly sourced and research hit piece based around one alleged escort (and failed blackmailer) with an admitted axe to grind and very flimsy evidence.
 
Furthermore, some very weird stuff has come out about who may or may not be "Ryan" (from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/17/gawker-got-in-bed-with-the-wrong-escort-and-civil-war-ensues.html )

On Friday, the Daily Caller, a right-leaning Washington-based news site, identified “Ryan” as 33-year-old Leif Derek Truitt from Austin, Texas, a male escort and porn star who appears on camera under the name Brodie Sinclair.
In an interview with the Daily Caller, Truitt—who has posted videos claiming that Barack Obama is “the son of the Devil” and the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the Russians—spouted a variety of conspiracy theories concerning the well-connected Geithner family.
 
Today, Gawker deleted the post from its website, but not by choice of their editors. Instead, the managing partnership voted 4-2 to remove it, and the editorial staff has not responded well.  http://politburo.gawker.com/a-statement-from-the-gawker-media-editorial-staff-1718649722


Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.
 
There's a whole lot going on and this whole thing is an abject disaster for Gawker. I'm gonna have to say I'm going to give this a few more days, but it's not often that a "news site", and I use that loosely, but even Gawker, publishes an extensive article accusing a man of cheating on his wife with a male escort and that man is the only one coming out of this looking even remotely clean.
 

E5 Yaz

Transcends message boarding
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Apr 25, 2002
90,032
Oregon
The brother of a former Treasury secretary is a celebrity?
 
I've been following this story and almost started a thread in P&G or V&N. I can't believe Gawker actually ran the piece. Geithner clearly made some bad decisions but no way did he deserve to be outed like this. And if you read the texts and emails, he treated the escort with nothing but respect. That dude has a screw loose and seems like a pretty awful guy. I feel bad for Geithner's family - this has to be awful for the three kids.
 

JBill

Member
SoSH Member
Aug 17, 2001
2,028
So is that the sum total of the response from Gawker editorial? They didn't want the piece taken down by the biz side after it was published. OK. What was the alternate plan? And did they explain somewhere the process by which it was initially edited and posted? All I saw was this from Gawker's EIC last night.

@max_read:
given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives
 

Cellar-Door

Member
SoSH Member
Aug 1, 2006
34,464
Gawker in the past has been slammed by the NY Times and others for their obsession with "outing" gay and bi-sexual men they think are news. Shep Smith at Fox News was one. On the whole it seems like Max Read and a couple of their other editors (One at Jezebel I know of, but can't remember her name) are just really awful people.
 

PBDWake

Member
SoSH Member
May 1, 2008
3,686
Peabody, MA
JBill said:
So is that the sum total of the response from Gawker editorial? They didn't want the piece taken down by the biz side after it was published. OK. What was the alternate plan? And did they explain somewhere the process by which it was initially edited and posted? All I saw was this from Gawker's EIC last night.

@max_read:
 
That was the entire response of the editorial board. There are some other, longer posts from people involved in actually removing it.
Editorial Board Comment- http://politburo.gawker.com/a-statement-from-the-gawker-media-editorial-staff-1718649722#_ga=1.166336637.271329506.1423958510
Nick Denton, CEO's post- http://nick.kinja.com/taking-a-post-down-1718581684
JK Trotter, journalist for Gawker- http://gawker.com/gawker-is-removing-story-about-conde-nast-cfo-1718582003
 

singaporesoxfan

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Jul 21, 2004
11,882
Washington, DC
This story - and the pathetic response of the Gawker staff - really made me so angry, and I'm normally a big Gawker / Deadspin fan. I mean, forget whether the subject was newsworthy. The post made Gawker an enabler of an extortion / blackmail attempt.

I presume except at Gawker HQ, many see this as a case of "it's good the grown-ups in the room finally took it down", rather than what the editorial side seems to assume, that this was an egregious violation of the separation between editorial and business that self-evidently shows why they needed to unionize. Nice to see that when their principles clash, the one that says "don't irrevocably harm LGBTQ people by outing them" (which they rightly criticized ESPN for in the Dr V putter story) is a secondary one.
 

GBrushTWood

New Member
Jul 12, 2005
372
Brookline
singaporesoxfan said:
Nice to see that when their principles clash, the one that says "don't irrevocably harm LGBTQ people by outing them" (which they rightly criticized ESPN for in the Dr V putter story) is a secondary one.
 
This is the most noteworthy item for me. Gawker has absolutely shitted all over Reddit these last few weeks for the Victoria/FPH/Pao saga. To me, a sanctimonious, holier than thou tone comes across in many of those stories/opinions. But the idea that Gawker/Deadspin et al criticize Reddit (or Grantland) for having a hateful minority, while posting tripe like the Geithner hatchet job, comes across as incredibly hypocritical to me. 
 
I'm OK with Gawker taking down the Geithner article, as it serves no purpose and really isn't interesting. I finished reading that article and thought to myself: "why the hell am I reading this dogshit? I don't give a shit who some Finance guy at Conde Nast is/isn't fucking."
I will continue reading Deadspin/Gawker/Reddit, etc, as I find them more interesting compared with mainstream media alternatives. But as with anything I read (mainstream media, blogs, message board comments), I will question the motives behind the authors text.  There really doesn't seem to be an alternative.
 
Edit: grammar
 

gingerbreadmann

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 11, 2008
750
Gawker has launched a petulant firestorm over Reddit the last couple weeks and have been continually called out in the comments for harboring an absurd grudge against them because they are owned by Conde Nast which is a "rival" media conglomerate. Then I saw this post last night and on cue, the comments were overwhelmingly negative. The Conde Nast connection is too large to ignore here, and Gawker really comes out of this looking bad.
 
It's disappointing to see this kind of thing coming from a site that more often than not astutely keeps websites, journalists, etc. in check for all the bullshit they put out. And then they post this flaming turd of an article. I can see where Read is coming from with calling out bigshot executives for cheating on wives and whatnot, but the problem with this story is that it's not juicy at all -- it's boring, and it comes off as an infantile hit piece with no substance behind it. Morality aside, even, there is no reason for it to exist.
 
Clicking on this thread a few minutes ago is the first I've seen about the shitstorm that has unfolded today, but from what's been written in this thread I'm unimpressed with their response to the managing board taking this piece down. Whoever mentioned the Grantland golf/transsexual story, that is an apt comparison because even though it wasn't ordered down by, say, Disney, Grantland (Simmons) took responsibility and swift action before it had to get to that point. It's too bad that Gawker is too stubborn to admit wrongdoing, which makes them no better than the crotchety news sites they lambast mercilessly on a daily basis.
 
About to catch up a little more on this story but that's my first impression. Really fucking lame all around.
 

PBDWake

Member
SoSH Member
May 1, 2008
3,686
Peabody, MA
GBrushTWood said:
 
This is the most noteworthy item for me. Gawker has absolutely shitted all over Reddit these last few weeks for the Victoria/FPH/Pao saga. To me, a sanctimonious, holier than thou tone comes across in many of those stories/opinions. But the idea that Gawker/Deadspin et al criticize Reddit (or Grantland) for having a hateful minority, while posting tripe like the Geithner hatchet job, comes across as incredibly hypocritical to me.
 
It's funny you mention reddit because that's the first place my mind went too. I've seen a number of linked articles on the Gawker network proclaiming the death of reddit, among all the articles shitting on reddit, and the commentors and authors that wade in there all have a definitive inferiority complex when it comes to Reddit. Considering the reports that the editorial board was heavily split on whether to publish the article in the first place, with it passing with a slim majority, I have to believe that if this guy was CFO of, say, Wonder Bread, it wouldn't have made it past the editors. But since it was Conde Nast, there was added incentive to bring out the hatchet.
 

nattysez

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 30, 2010
8,436
The great thing is that because the Hulk Hogan trial got delayed, Hulk's attorneys are going to find a way to work this into the case.  It's pretty clear evidence of the shaky basis upon which Gawker determines that something is "newsworthy" and makes them very unsympathetic.  There is a pretty good shot that Gawker is going to lose that case, though I'm not sure they'll lose enough in damages to go out of business.
 
To wit:
 
 
 

nattysez

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 30, 2010
8,436
PBDWake said:
 
It's funny you mention reddit because that's the first place my mind went too. I've seen a number of linked articles on the Gawker network proclaiming the death of reddit, among all the articles shitting on reddit, and the commentors and authors that wade in there all have a definitive inferiority complex when it comes to Reddit. Considering the reports that the editorial board was heavily split on whether to publish the article in the first place, with it passing with a slim majority, I have to believe that if this guy was CFO of, say, Wonder Bread, it wouldn't have made it past the editors. But since it was Conde Nast, there was added incentive to bring out the hatchet.
 
Gawker has a relatively small group of things that they absolutely hate:  Silicon Valley, Reddit, people who think Brooklyn is cool, rich people, and gentrification being the ones that come immediately to mind.  
 

singaporesoxfan

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Jul 21, 2004
11,882
Washington, DC
Forget the Hogan case, there's a risk that the person who was outed sues. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/17/gawker_libel_suit_publication_should_worried.html

Doesn't seem like many journalists are rising in support of the Gawker staff's point of view. Here's some tweets from journalists about that editorial staff statement:

NYT's Mike Barbaro @mikiebarb: Gawker is imploding under the weight of its own profoundly misguided self-righteousness: http://t.co/hw6Jib9kNs

The Atlantic's James Fallows: @JamesFallows: Could Gawker look worse today than it did yesterday?

Yes it can! And does.

http://t.co/BbrlDnAHxC


Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis: @jeffjarvis: Good God. Gawker's "union" is objecting to that objectionable post being killed. No standards. At all. http://t.co/D7uH0Au5dm
 

Pilgrim

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 24, 2006
2,406
Jamaica Plain
I'm glad for the Weinstein piece, because I couldn't tell if Gawker has actually changed over the last year, or if they've always been this bad and it was my politics or personality that has changed.  It was never more than a guilty pleasure but now its an insanely hypocritical and nasty mess.  
 
Most of the mainland bloggers are deeply stupid when they're trying to be smart, and cruel when they're trying to be funny.
 
I hope Hulk Hogan sues the site into oblivion and then does his crappy leg drop finisher on Nick Denton's lego head.
 

Pilgrim

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 24, 2006
2,406
Jamaica Plain
nattysez said:
 
Gawker has a relatively small group of things that they absolutely hate:  Silicon Valley, Reddit, people who think Brooklyn is cool, rich people, and gentrification being the ones that come immediately to mind.  
This stuff drives me nuts, because almost everybody who works there is some white nobody from bugtussle who just moved to NYC to work for a nu-media company and starts complaining about gentrification.    
 
I guess its impossible to write opinion about politics or the media without being a bit of a hypocrite but they take it to another level.
 

DannyDarwinism

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 7, 2007
4,883
* Correction: This post originally stated that Heather Dietrick, the President and chief legal counsel of Gawker Media, voted to remove the post. In fact her vote was miscounted due to a miscommunication that occurred during a Friday morning meeting where the managing partners voted; Dietrick voted to keep the post.
 
 
This "correction" is hilarious.  I wonder how big a brick Dietrick shit when Gawker publicly announced that their own GC voted to spike the article.
 

JBill

Member
SoSH Member
Aug 17, 2001
2,028
Pilgrim said:
Most of the mainland bloggers are deeply stupid when they're trying to be smart, and cruel when they're trying to be funny.
From a reporter at this party:

While the post was being published last night, many of Gawker's editors were enjoying cocktails in Denton's Soho apartment.
...
After the post was published, many of the Gawker editors seemed genuinely surprised that so many people objected it and were quick to dismiss criticism. When Jordan Sargent, the post's author, showed up halfway through the party, Gawker staffers congratulated him on the post. A few editors were glued to their phones, checking Twitter and Chartbeat to stay up to date on the angry tweets from other journalists and the number of people currently reading the post.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/07/8572333/after-outcry-gawker-removes-post-about-media-executive
 

Nator

Member
SoSH Member
I think that they will come out ahead in the long run with the additional PR.

Short term, watching Gawker tie themselves into knots trying to navigate this self inflicted wound will be fascinating. I will be getting a big bowl of popcorn ready to enjoy this Shakespearean tragedy unfold over the next couple of days.

Thanks, Gawker.
 

Marciano490

Urological Expert
SoSH Member
Nov 4, 2007
62,312
From what I've heard, a number of NY law firms are lining up to lead a potential suit against Gawker. Not positive it's actionable, but I'd love to see whatever's left over after Hogan go to Geithner, as much as he doesn't need it.
 

Average Reds

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 24, 2007
35,330
Southwestern CT
mikeford said:
Well he's also CFO of Conde Nast, if that raises his public profile any in someone's eyes. 
 
It doesn't make him any more of a public figure, but it does reveal that he's the CFO of a competitive organization, which only makes Gawker Media look more petty and small.
 
BannedbyNYYFans.com said:
I've been following this story and almost started a thread in P&G or V&N. I can't believe Gawker actually ran the piece. Geithner clearly made some bad decisions but no way did he deserve to be outed like this. And if you read the texts and emails, he treated the escort with nothing but respect. That dude has a screw loose and seems like a pretty awful guy. I feel bad for Geithner's family - this has to be awful for the three kids.
 
Gawker better hope that the worst they are guilty of is incredibly bad judgment.  If it turns out that any of the texts have been fabricated, their company will be reduced to smoking rubble within a very short period of time.
 

CaptainLaddie

dj paul pfieffer
SoSH Member
Sep 6, 2004
36,692
where the darn libs live
Honestly, good.

I really like Deadspin, but the rest of the Gawker network could be reduced to a rubble and I'd be cool with it.  Between the shitheads who run Jezebel abd the morons who head Gawker itself, it seems to me like most of their network is a bunch of dummies.
 

JayMags71

Member
SoSH Member
Tommy Craggs and Max Read are Resigning from Gawker
 
Tommy Craggs, the executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, are resigning from the company. In letters sent today, Craggs and Read informed staff members that the managing partnership’s vote to remove a controversial post about the CFO of Condé Nast—a unprecedented act endorsed by zero editorial employees—represented an indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker’s business interests and the independence of its editorial staff. Under those conditions, Craggs and Read wrote, they could not possibly guarantee Gawker’s editorial integrity.
 

Detts

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Jul 20, 2005
5,165
Greenville, SC
CaptainLaddie said:
Honestly, good.
I really like Deadspin, but the rest of the Gawker network could be reduced to a rubble and I'd be cool with it.  Between the shitheads who run Jezebel abd the morons who head Gawker itself, it seems to me like most of their network is a bunch of dummies.
 
Io9 is decent.
 

MarcSullivaFan

Member
SoSH Member
Aug 21, 2005
3,412
Hoo-hoo-hoo hoosier land.
On one hand, I understand the general concern about the suits undermining Gawker's editorial independence. On the other hand, if Craggs and Read can't be the fucking adults in the room, then tough shit. They didn't seem very concerned about journalistic ethics when they were destroying someone's life for no discernible reason other than more clicks. Shitheads.
 

Foulkey Reese

foulkiavelli
SoSH Member
Apr 12, 2006
21,795
Central CT
It's pretty amazing how many fucking awful people Gawker has managed to employ over the years.
 
I remember a post a few years back where a woman emailed that a man on the train was making sexual gestures towards her. So she took a picture of him and they published it without any kind of proof or corroboration. The guy in the shot could have been anybody or the emailer could have been a crazy person, but they had no problem destroying his life for a few clicks based on the word of somebody they didn't know.
 
Of course I bet everybody complaining about this will keep clicking on Deadspin and io9, ect. No real reason for them not to be assholes. 
 

singaporesoxfan

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Jul 21, 2004
11,882
Washington, DC
MarcSullivaFan said:
I can honestly say that I have not gone to any of their sites since this broke and will not in the future. And I was a daily reader of Deadspin.
 
Same here (except to read the resignations). Obviously that's anecdotal and we may be a tiny minority.
 
It's funny, Gawker staffers' defense of editorial integrity to publish and maintain offensive (and potentially libelous) content on Gawker sounds just like Redditors who use the "free speech" defense for the offensive content on Reddit, a defense that Gawker has (rightly) hammered Reddit for.
 

PBDWake

Member
SoSH Member
May 1, 2008
3,686
Peabody, MA
I will say this for Gawker, at least the people being defiant assholes and waving the bird are the ones doing so on the way out the door. If, as the board is saying, that now that their voice is bigger, they need to trawl the sewage less, then at least there's that. Damning with faint praise and whatnot, but yeah. Still, they'll need to show some semblance of actual change before they get another shot from me
 

Zososoxfan

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 30, 2009
9,209
South of North
Not into the world of media as others here are, but I certainly won't stop reading Deadspin because of it, even though from my limited understanding of the events, the editors were in the wrong here.
 

pantsparty

Member
SoSH Member
May 2, 2011
555
I get that the business side of a publication going over the head of the EIC to pull a piece goes against normal protocol, but if the people in charge of the editorial staff couldn't tell that this wasn't appropriate to run then the business side needed to fire them anyway.
 

Turrable

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 12, 2011
2,670
Zososoxfan said:
Not into the world of media as others here are, but I certainly won't stop reading Deadspin because of it, even though from my limited understanding of the events, the editors were in the wrong here.
 
Same, but it's getting harder. I can't quit the stuff like Why Your Team Sucks, but they're hard to take seriously when they get on a soapbox. "We hate brands and capitalism, now check out these sweet-ass deals on Amazon!" "Hot take journalism is bad, except for all of our headlines!" Stuff like that gets difficult to ignore when their flagship site is doing it to the extreme, running a story directly in its wheelhouse of "too boring for TMZ, too petty and stupid for anyone else" and using it as yet another chance to get up its own ass about their goddamn union (they cross-posted like five updates about that to Deadspin as if it was some Curt Flood moment in journalism). Couple that with the existence of sites like Kotaku, which appears to be run out of a high school computer lab, and cross-post all of the ensuing mess to Deadspin for #synergy, and it's hard not to get sick of it. Even Greg Howard had a post up today that was literally "here is a good paragraph from the new book that is good."     
 

nattysez

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 30, 2010
8,436
I suspect that if you're going to quit every time the guy who runs your blog/newspaper/magazine says "Sorry, but I'm not going to run that piece as it is because I don't consider it appropriate for our blog/newspaper/magazine," you're going to have a short career.  
 
I'll be curious to see what employer Craggs and Read decide can live up to their standards.  Conveniently, Simmons is supposedly preparing to announce his next destination shortly.
 

nattysez

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 30, 2010
8,436
And karma claims another victim -- Hulk Hogan was awarded $115mm for the sex tape. I don't know how much money Gawker raised in that fundraising round, but you have to think that this is way more than they anticipated they were going to have to pay. I'm very curious to see if/how they divvy up that amount amongst the defendants. I've got to think AJ Daulerio will declaring personal bankruptcy if he's required to cover even $2mm of that.

Edit: Obviously, there will be appeals and the amount could quite possibly get reduced. Even if they were sure it'd get reduced, $115mm is a lot of cheddar to have hanging over your life/business decisions.

Edit 2: Punitive damages get handed down on Monday. I predict that the jury will award an unsupportable high number.
 
Last edited:

Grin&MartyBarret

Member
SoSH Member
Oct 2, 2007
4,932
East Village, NYC
And karma claims another victim -- Hulk Hogan was awarded $115mm for the sex tape. I don't know how much money Gawker raised in that fundraising round, but you have to think that this is way more than they anticipated they were going to have to pay. I'm very curious to see if/how they divvy up that amount amongst the defendants. I've got to think AJ Daulerio will declaring personal bankruptcy if he's required to cover even $2mm of that.

Edit: Obviously, there will be appeals and the amount could quite possibly get reduced. Even if they were sure it'd get reduced, $115mm is a lot of cheddar to have hanging over your life/business decisions.

Edit 2: Punitive damages get handed down on Monday. I predict that the jury will award an unsupportable high number.
Wasn't this and tape that Hulk Hogan's friend secretly recorded to gather evidence that Hogan was fucking his wife?

I'm not sure anybody in this situation really has Karma on their side.