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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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The "He's not notable" angle put me to thinking though, as I saw it mentioned here and in several articles covering Gawker's article. It implies that what Gawker did would be more acceptable if he were a public figure, which seems silly when I think of it that way. Why is it more acceptable to enable blackmail and publish someone's private mistakes if that person is well-known?

The standard isn't "well known" so much as "in the public interest". For example, in the case of numerous closeted politicians who publicly campaign against gay rights, the public interest of the constituency outweighs the individual's desire for privacy.

This is of course subjective, which is why its an actual ethical question that must be evaluated by the journalist rather than a hard and fast rule. There are obviously better and worse ways to handle it, especially on sensitive personal matters like sexuality.

Once you get outside of politics into celebrities, it gets much murkier, and the standard should be higher unless it's something that relates directly to something that celebrity has done or spoken on publicly (Smith and vaccines, Cruise and Scientology, etc.) But often for celebrities, it just becomes a question of prurient curiosity rather than legitimate public interest.

From the sounds of it, there isn't a reasonable argument that this random tech executive passes a public interest test of any sort.

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Yeah, I agree with CLW's assessment. When reporting of this nature reveals the hypocrisy of politicians who are acting privately in direct opposition to their public views, it does presumably have some sort of value in the public's judgment of that politician's morality. Instead, this story is essentially not much better than a group of Redditor's doxxing someone they don't like. It's also particularly problematic because it assumes a lot - who knows what kind of relationship this guy has with his wife? Portraying this as cheating firmly seats this as a moral judgment of his character, but there is a distinct chance that this is delving into someone's private life with absolutely no context.

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Also that Milo douchebag is acting all outraged even though he's been, in the past, pro-doxxing and other privacy-revealing. He calls it "citizen journalism."

 

Three part takedown piece on Randi Harper, that's all I'm saying. But, hey, he can dump on gawker all he likes. :P

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That's good to know... I was just about to write an email to them.

 

Still, GOG might not want that logo to feature as proudly on the site... :o

 

Obviously, it is used there to signal GOG's support for their ideology. As if. GOG's been really, really careful not to misstep and keep out of that whole mess. Notably, they're still cooperating with John Bain, but also follow e.g. Wil Weaton on twitter. And occasionally, well, shit happens to them. :mellow:

 

On the whole, I really think GOG shouldn't be under scrutiny in gamergate related matters when Valve is not... it's obvious what service actually benefits here.

 

GOG are currently running a "33-75% off TotalBiscuit's Picks" sale. Maybe they're edging into the mess?

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I think there's a strong possibility that the chronological distance from TB's primary involvement in GG might just mean that this is a totally tonedeaf move by GOG.

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Or an attempt at uniting what definitely doesn't want to be united. Y'know, the Mark Kern kind of 'heal the rift'.

 

I've mostly kept out of it, but could not resist commenting on TB advertising "Dreamfall 1 + 2" in his promo video.

 

Calling The Longest Journey "Dreamfall 1", that's a bit like calling the "Buffy" series "Angel 1". :rolleyes:

 

Had Anita Sarkeesian made that mistake, a thousand angry gamergate supporters would immediately commence ripping those imaginary gamer diplomas off her walls. :lol:

 

And, of course, judging from the frequency with which TB's minions are pestering Ragnar Tørnquist's twitter with the SJW this the SJW that, it really is a joke that TB's supposedly advertising Ragnar's games.

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GOG are currently running a "33-75% off TotalBiscuit's Picks" sale. Maybe they're edging into the mess?

 

 

I think there's a strong possibility that the chronological distance from TB's primary involvement in GG might just mean that this is a totally tonedeaf move by GOG.

 

Either himself or his Starcraft 2 team Axiom is sponsored by GoG.

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Update on the Gawker thing:

 

The article has been taken down (archived version available here), and an explanation posted. It's your typical corporate press release which inappropriately spends most of its time building up the company rather than discussing the issue at hand. The important bits are:
 

The point of this story was not in my view sufficient to offset the embarrassment to the subject and his family. Accordingly, I have had the post taken down. It is the first time we have removed a significant news story for any reason other than factual error or legal settlement.
...
This action will not turn back the clock. David Geithner’s embarrassment will not be eased. But this decision will establish a clear standard for future stories. It is not enough for them simply to be true. They have to reveal something meaningful. They have to be true and interesting. These texts were interesting, but not enough, in my view.

 

Conspicuously absent is any admission that they did a shitty thing by enabling a blackmailer. I find it interesting that they're taking the article down, because as they admit, the damage has been done. Heck, the removed article page links to the explanation of why the article was taken down, which of course summarizes the content of the article. I suppose taking it down is supposed to be symbolic, but it seems like a deliberately manipulative act to symbolically fix something when you can't actually fix the thing.

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GOG are currently running a "33-75% off TotalBiscuit's Picks" sale. Maybe they're edging into the mess?

 

I keep reading this as '33-75% off TotalBiscuit's Prick'.

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I would feel sympathy for due process argument (personally a big sympathizer for 'systematic justice') if it was somewhat related beyond feint similarity.  The core appeal of due process is for the greater systematic good.  I don't see any of that here.  It was one profit motivated decision overruled by different type of profit motivated decision within a corporate environment.  Nowhere does the notion of greater social good apply to whether Gawker's business entity will pull articles or not when Gawkers never really gave two shit about social goods in the first place.  I mean only social good to speak of is them retracting an article that most likely caused harm to a person.

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Yah I agree ^. Also it bothers me that a site like gawker(and many people on the internet) still think they can reach into a person's life and cause "embarrassment" (which is really public shaming). 

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Oh man, I...fuck, the people who work for Gawker in that thread are actually making me decide to never read their work again, and there's a few people in there I like.  Where was your public outrage when the piece was published?  Fuck you all. 

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The fact that Totilo is defending it makes me want to ignore Kotaku all over again, even though I only keep up with Patrick Klepek's articles now.

 

Edit: Thought experiment - imagine some GG-friendly site outing a member of the Gawker family (which might have happened already at some point?) and some scumfuck GG editor in the comments saying "we should keep this story up to foster discussion." Now imagine someone like Totilo nodding his head sagely instead of dropping editorial napalm on those motherfuckers.

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I guess I can give them that taking down the post was ineffective at this point (mostly because they put the damaging information into their apology anyway), but that doesn't mean that taking it down isn't still the absolute first thing that has to happen in this case. And if a "large percentage" of your editors disagreed with putting it up in the first place, how come it went through? I guess "many" does not mean "most" here, which also doesn't speak well to the judgement of most of their editors. Ultimately, I'm confused how anybody could think this is the appropriate time to complain about corporate meddling. Either you would have removed that post yourself anyway or you would have demonstrated why you clearly need corporate supervision if you had decided to leave it up.

 

A thing that still slightly bugs me about this is how people talk about it as "the work of Gawker". It's an issue that Ian Williams tweeted about briefly and that really needs about several pages of nuance to do justice but the short of it is that internet publishing is really weird and none of the big sites that we have are monoliths, so talking about them as unified things rarely makes sense (unless you're going to have a really messy conversation about structural issues). Doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable for this shit, but the "never going to read this outlet again" response was really more at home in the age of newspapers, when the shitty stories came physically bundled with the good stuff and there was no way around supporting both at the same time except to stop altogether.

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^ Haha I thought I didn't do that but I just realised I totally did in my last post. Damn it brain. 

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I didn't really mean to vaguely call anyone out. it's hard to tell in individual cases whether people mean that Gawker allowed this through, which speaks to a real structural issue with editorial oversight in their "throw everything at the wall" model, or whether they mean that Gawker decided to do this, where it's more likely that this was a call made by an individual writer and editor or some small combination of people.

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So, TotalBiscuit has made a new Steam Curation page called The Framerate Police which exists only to compile a list of games which run at thirty FPS. Because he's TotalBiscuit and has (obviously completely innocuously) cultivated a following composed of entitled harassers, this is not being used to "educate consumers" or whatever it's meant to do, but to - surprise surprise - stoke a bunch of witch hunts on indie devs. Here's one that actually updated his game's store page in order to quell "threats."

 

Apparently Bain responded to all this but it makes me physically ill to listen to him so I can only surmise what he says. ("Blah blah blah, sorry for helping make your game better, I eat shit.")

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I don't want to bring down the Iwata thread so I'll say it here: it's super gross and utterly predictable that the gators have weaponized Iwata to harass developers who don't grovel before their talking points.

They've literally been calling Rami Ismail the anti-Iwata (and threatening to get him fired from Vlambeer) over his keynote where he said he was a dev first and not a gamer.

Other various shitbirds have been misusing Iwata's words to hate on games that fail gamer definitions of "game".

jfc

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Biscuit's attempt at corralling his followers attempting to cry "Censorship!" and boycott after Guild of Dungeoneering removed the Framerate Police Curator tag from its store page.

 

This group is a purely objective list and nothing more. It passes no judgments and expresses no opinions.

 

Ah, that unique brand of disingenuous obliviousness that comprises TotalBiscuit.

 

Note that this is one of several such threads on the game's Steam forum. And the developer put his dumb Curator thing back on the store page too, in good faith, because thirty frames per second is objectively worse and people need to know!!

 

Edit: Oops, he pulled back more than I'd originally given him credit for, as I feared I might have done.

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20141024-hornets.png
 

That said:

 

Note that this is one of several such threads on the game's Steam forum, and the only one he replied to (and therefore perhaps the only low profile instance of him pulling back on the leash).

 

Low profile instance? In that very thread he says:
 

I just made a group announcement that went out to everyone subscribed, telling people that we absolutely are not ok with this kind of behavior and if we see people engaging in witchhunting and making threats on the Steam forums they will be perma-banned

 

And he also said "don't witchhunt them" on his Twitter. How much more high profile can he get? It feels like you're disingenuously trying to make him look as shitty as possible, which is unnecessary given how shitty he already looks.

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And he also said "don't witchhunt them" on his Twitter. How much more high profile can he get? It feels like you're disingenuously trying to make him look as shitty as possible, which is unnecessary given how shitty he already looks.

TB seems to routinely do this kind of thing. He creates the environment for it to happen, and when it inevitably does he puts out a statement about how his actions were co-opted or misunderstood. I mean the name alone is confrontational, he could have changed it. Alternatively, instead of highlighting games that don't live up to his expectations he could have highlighted ones that do. Instead he continues to foster negativity, it then gets away from him, and he puts out an indignant and finger pointing statement that peripherally acknowledges the problem but spends most of the time vindicating himself.

I just don't buy the sincerity of his statements and warnings. He is handing out guns and telling everyone not to shoot them. His initial action is always public, where the most eyes can see it, and the response is always on a lower traffic place.

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Having just Googled this, it feels like you're deliberately cutting the context from a short story to make it sound worse. A male escort had sex with the married male CFO of a company, tried to blackmail them, they refused, so the escort took their story to Gawker who published it, almost certainly because the person was a major figure at a rival company, rather than a notable public figure. The full story is still plenty scummy.

 

The "He's not notable" angle put me to thinking though, as I saw it mentioned here and in several articles covering Gawker's article. It implies that what Gawker did would be more acceptable if he were a public figure, which seems silly when I think of it that way. Why is it more acceptable to enable blackmail and publish someone's private mistakes if that person is well-known?

You've got this wrong on a couple of counts. Firstly, there was no sex, there was only the solicitation. When the escort tried to extort the CFO of Conde Nast, the CFO turned around and backed out of the whole situation, saying his flight had been delayed. And this is all assuming that all the evidence presented by the escort is true which, judging by his now-public FB profile, isn't an easy sell (the escort is a 911 Truther and full-on conspiracy theorist).

 

Secondly, the talk about being a public figure mostly revolves around the CFO's ability to sue for libel and win. It's much more difficult for a public figure to win libel suits, so painting the CFO as one would help Gawker's (potential) defense--the problem is the flimsiness of that argument.

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I just don't buy the sincerity of his statements and warnings. He is handing out guns and telling everyone not to shoot them. His initial action is always public, where the most eyes can see it, and the response is always on a lower traffic place.

 

In what world is a group with the description "We catalogue games that are locked at 30fps so you can see them at a glance and mention if it is possible to unlock the framerate by other means." comparable to handing out guns? As for lower traffic places are you talking about? He sent the anti-witchhunt announcement to all members of the Steam group, and also tweeted about it. As I asked in the bit you quoted, how much more high profile can he get? This is a case where he was as public with the response as with the initial action.

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