Why Are Left-Leaning Media Sources Suddenly Defending Nick Denton And ‘Gawker’?

On Friday, Gawker filed for bankruptcy protection. The Daily Beast is one of the sources that is reporting the news.

“In what is either an interim victory for Gawker hater and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel or a prudent maneuver by Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, the online media company declared bankruptcy Friday and has has put itself up for sale as it confronts a $140.1 million judgment in Hulk Hogan’s sex video lawsuit.”

The article adds that Ziff Davis, the company who runs Recode, has offered Gawker $100 million dollars to purchase Denton’s empire. Gawker‘s Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection would protect the company’s assets from being handed over to Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea).

It’s quite ironic that many left-leaning outlets, who have condemned Gawker for the past year, are now on Gawker‘s side. It all comes down to what the New York Times reported on a couple weeks back.

“A billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur was outed as being gay by a media organization [Valleywag, Gawker‘s other site]. His friends suffered at the hands of the same gossip site. Nearly a decade later, the entrepreneur secretly financed a lawsuit to try to put the media company out of business.”

When it was revealed that Peter Thiel, a gay man who was outed against his will, was helping Donald Trump’s campaign, many left-leaning sites did a 360 degree turn and tried to play the “free speech” card. Slate, no longer seeing Peter Thiel as a gay man who was exploited just because he is a Republican, declared that Mark Zuckerberg needed to dump Thiel from Facebook’s Board of Directors.

“The Hogan case is far from over, with appeals just starting, but Thiel may well be the instrument of Gawker‘s destruction. That is vastly scarier than anything Gawker could imagine doing. As Fusion‘s Felix Salmon pointed out, Thiel has given fellow members of the ultra-rich and powerful a dangerous blueprint for shutting down legal speech,” writes columnist Dan Gillmor, who tells his readers that people equating Gawker‘s actions with Thiel’s are “embarrassing” themselves.

Jordan Freiman from Death and Taxes even goes as far as to say that Peter Thiel was never outed and certainly doesn’t hide his bias.

“The irony in all of this is that Thiel is apparently a big supporter, at least financially, of the Committee for Protection of Journalists. He is also a Donald Trump supporter, and let’s not forget that Trump has not been shy about insulting the press, and openly discussing his plans to gut the First Amendment and open up libel laws.”

It’s sort of ironic that Gawker‘s Nick Denton is now playing the victim after victimizing so many people over the past decade and building a wall of karma larger than The Great Wall of China. It’s also ironic that the many websites that condemned Gawker for outing an allegedly gay Condé Nast executive are no longer concerned about the feelings of somebody who was outed a decade ago when the environment was far more harsh to the LGBT community.

The left’s war against people who don’t completely agree with their line of thinking is not only dangerous, but the resentment against it is also causing corrupt people like Donald Trump to come to power. There’s no other way to put it: Gawker was wrong and their brand of clickbait journalism that allows individuals and their families to be destroyed is nearing the end of its life cycle.

[Photo by John Pendygraft and Tristan Fewing/Getty Images]