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We're entering another era of defining First Amendment law through the courts.According to Entertainment Tonight, this was not even their first date. "He gets that this isn't just about him being mad at Gawker and there are much larger issues at stake. "Thiel is a) no dummy, and b) a lawyer," said Lemann.
GAWKER SUED FREE
Some will be about tech companies' privacy against government intrusion, like the FBI's standoff against Apple earlier this year, others about tech platforms as a public space, still others about the freedom of "algorithmic" speech.Ĭolumbia itself just opened the doors to its new free press law center, the Knight First Amendment Institute, founded to preserve, protect and reshape First Amendment law in an era when its not that popular and companies like Gawker are financially stretched.
GAWKER SUED SERIES
The cornerstones of the country's libel laws are a series of landmark Supreme Court cases, and more are likely on their way. Luckily for the media, America's press laws are generally not left up to plebiscite or legislation, but the courts.
GAWKER SUED FULL
Gawker Media, now for sale, picked up a bid from Ziff Davis for a mere $100 million.) Still, on a scale of one to 10, from "not at all important" to "very important," 57 percent of respondents rated a free press the full 10. (Thiel is worth $2.7 billion, according to Forbes, with stakes in Facebook, AirBnB and big data startup Palantir, valued at $20 billion.
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The respondents saw Gawker, not Thiel, as the "big institution" stepping on the little guy. In fact, 65 percent of respondents of the YouGov poll said that stunts like Thiel's "level the playing field for individuals who would not have the means to mount a case against big institutions on their own." In this case, the individual was Hulk Hogan, who with Thiel's help successfully sued Gawker for publishing a sextape of his back in 2012. It's not a new phenomenon: even in its "golden age," the American media was widely derided, particularly on the right, whether it was Republicans at the 1964 convention spitting on reporters or President Richard Nixon's unrelenting hatred of the major newspapers ( run and dominated, he privately said, by "the Jews"). A Pew survey from 2013 ranked journalism as one of the least respected professions, barely scraping by lawyers and business executives. In fact, it's downright loathed by the public: Only six percent of people say they have confidence in the press, according to The Media Insight Project. "The media never has been a big winner of popularity contests, perhaps even less now in the Internet-age than before," Lemann added. (The survey sampled 1,000 people selected from an opt-in Internet panel stratified by gender, age, race, education, and region out of the 2014 American Community Study.) The antipathy for Gawker certainly wasn't any kind of class solidarity with the billionaire Thiel: Over half of the survey's respondents reported making less than $50k per year, with only 14 percent making $100k or more. "The Gawker example is a more standard case, where you're defending something more sleazeball," Lemann said. Occasionally there are more inspiring cases, such as the New York Times fighting to publish the Pentagon Papers, but those are harder to come by. The fact is, cases testing the limits of free speech are usually centered around unsympathetic causes: pornography, obscenity, and the sense of humor of people like Hustler Magazine's Larry Flint. "All free expression cases are about unattractive expression."
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"It doesn't surprise me at all," said Nicholas Lemann, Dean Emeritus at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "Do you believe the success of Gawker's opponents in the court system makes our free press more vulnerable?" the survey asked.
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The survey, taken right after the news broke in August, revealed that a majority of respondents didn't consider Thiel's mission to torpedo an unsympathetic media outfit a problem for free speech. "All free expression cases are about unattractive expression" And most Americans could not care less, according to a poll by YouGov conducted for Vice News.