One More Way That Hulk Hogan’s Legacy Has Hurt America:
The tawdry story begins at some point in or around 2006. Bollea was having trouble in his marriage and was, by his own account, severely depressed. One day, he visited the home of his friend, a Tampa shock jock named Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Clem invited Bollea to have sex with his wife, Heather. The two apparently had an arrangement. But Clem also had a hidden camera in his bedroom — and what he probably didn’t mention that day was that he was going to burn the footage onto a DVD, label it “HOGAN” with a Sharpie, and leave it in an unlocked drawer.
It took that tape somewhere around six years to reach the Manhattan offices of Gawker Media, in 2012. At the time, Gawker was no longer a gossipy blog for the media elite and those just outside the walls. It was that, plus a news aggregator, plus a tabloid, plus an occasional source of literary essays. It was, without question, the most interesting and unpredictable of the rising class of digital media properties. According to a later report by BuzzFeed News, Gawker’s editor in chief, A.J. Daulerio, used a somewhat circular logic to determine the video had news value: A Hulk Hogan sex tape was fair game because there had previously been reported rumors about a Hulk Hogan sex tape. Consequentially, Daulerio made the decision not just to confirm the tape’s existence and summarize its lurid contents but also to publish a roughly two-minute excerpt from it.
Bollea’s lawyers tried to have Gawker take the video down, but the site refused. In 2013, Bollea sued Gawker — as well as Daulerio and Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton — for invasion of privacy, seeking damages of $100 million. Then, rather than settle the suit, as Gawker seemed to expect he would, Bollea spent years pursuing justice through the courts before finally winning at trial in 2016. In the end, the court ordered Gawker to pay $140 million in damages, forcing the company into bankruptcy.
OK, fine. Perhaps we need shed few tears over Gawker’s demise. However:
In a sense, looking back, the sex tape was a bit of a MacGuffin: a plot-advancing mechanism drummed up by the authors of our reality, in this case the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who paid Bollea’s legal fees on the condition he not settle with the website, with the goal of destroying it. His grudge against Gawker was born in 2007, when Valleywag published a short article outing him as gay. Thiel’s plot to take Gawker down was hatched the year before the Hogan tape was even published, in 2011. And his financial and strategic involvement in the suit was revealed, like a magician’s prestige, only after the verdict against Gawker came down. Ta-da.
Which brings us to this item, buried among today’s headlines:
U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies have been waging legal war for months against liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, and a report from The New York Times on Friday claimed that the organization is now in dire financial straits as it’s been racking up millions in legal expenses.
According to the Times, Media Matters has incurred legal expenses of $15 million in its efforts to defend itself against lawsuits from X owner Elon Musk, as well as investigations launched by the Federal Trade Commission and two Republican state attorneys general. The expenses from the lawsuits have also had the add-on effect of making donors to the organization “skittish,” writes the Times, and the organization has had to slash its staff in half.
We see this everywhere, from CBS’s voluntary emasculation to draconian cuts at NPR. This indeed is the ‘Orban Playbook’, and the free press is the enemy.
I know this is sounding like an “everyone is stupid but me” piece. And … well, it’s at least not only that. Running a successful digital media operation is really, really hard. Most of our ideas about how journalism is supposed to work in business terms are the product of specific technological and business factors that were undone at the turn of the century. To cite just the most obvious example, most people’s idea of what print (or we should we now say “words”) journalism should be is based on the metropolitan daily paper. But that existed because for quite a few decades one or two companies in a very capital-intensive business could have a de facto monopoly over most commercial speech in a major metropolitan area. That was a lucrative and stable business to be in. But the internet destroyed it. Everyone’s been trying to build something else ever since, with pretty uneven luck. And it all got harder when the tech monopolies became mature about a decade ago.
Bezos got antsy about his money-losing business. He’s also reacting to the political needs of his other businesses (a big factor I’m not addressing in this post). And he’s defaulting to what was probably the biggest error of the first two decades of the 21st century on the business side of the journalism business: the idea that the dynamics, business concepts and mores of the tech world were applicable to the news business. They’re mostly not. And here we mean not the “media” business, to which there is some application, but the news business. Again, not the same thing. Bezos is clearly a really smart and able guy. But since the Post is maybe his fifth or sixth priority he’s even more likely than he might normally be to default to his comfort-level assumptions, that the news business is basically like tech and the people he’ll hire are the people who speak his language, which is billionaire.
Trump’s ‘magic trick’ no longer working? I remain skeptical, but, if so, this might be why:
To explain, I need to remind you of something I said last week – that as far as maga was concerned, for the last decade or so, Trump has been the exception to the rule of everything, such that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. He could lead an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government and not lose support. He could be friends with a child-sex trafficker and not lose support. No matter what he did, maga never held him accountable.
Why? In large part, because maga is in thrall to conspiracy theories that claim to explain how things work. One of them holds that the world is dominated by shadowy elites who control the government, the corporations and the media. This (Jewish) cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime – including the most heinous, like child-sex trafficking and even cannibalism – and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.
Belief in these stories was so strong that even when Trump was found guilty of committing crimes, as he was before the election when a jury convicted him on 34 counts of fraud, he couldn’t possibly be that guilty in the eyes of maga. After all, his conviction was seen as proof of the conspiracy against him and America.
When the US Department of Justice closed the case on Jeffrey Epstein earlier this month, Trump’s followers were forced to choose between their leader and their belief in a pernicious plot to destroy their way of life, and because they were not going to stop believing in their imaginary enemies, they were suddenly open to the possibility that Trump isn’t the man they believed him to be. It was a crisis of faith.
This crisis of faith is why Trump’s normal diversionary tactics are not working as they used to. With assistance from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, he tried to draw attention away from the Epstein scandal by accusing Barack Obama of “cheating” in the 2016 election. That might have worked when maga believed Trump is a victim of the deep state (which, in magaworld, is controlled by those who control Obama) but now that Trump won’t release the Epstein files, it’s no longer clear to maga whether he’s against “the globalists.”
I find this intriguing.
Those Considering The Data Center Proposal Should Consider This:
Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.
The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.
The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.
Haggis Tonight? Uh, no. But I take my tam o’shanter off to the people of Scotland.
What do you want to talk about?