Rieder: Gawker chief unlikely champion of media ethics

The takedown of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the noted virulent communist-hunter of long ago, by Army Counsel Joseph Welch remains an American classic.

"You've done enough," the attorney told the out-of-control U.S. senator from Wisconsin. "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

It's a question that has been asked for some time about Gawker Media, a company widely known for its salacious and intrusive stories, stories which often lack a reason for being other than being mean and attracting clicks.

Gawker, of course, is not alone. While the advent of the digital age has a huge upside, there is a nasty Internet underbelly that is truly off-putting.

From the comments sections of too many news outlets to the dark subterranean corners of Reddit to the trolls who forced Reddit CEO Ellen Pao out of her job, viciousness, vitriol and misogyny are far too prevalent.

That's what makes the decision by Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton to repudiate and take down a widely criticized story accusing a media company CFO of soliciting sex from a male porn actor, a charge the executive denies, so surprising. Are there actually limits at Gawker? Is there really an emerging sense of decency?

On Monday came news that Tommy Craggs, executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, editor in chief of its flagship site Gawker.com, were resigning. Not because they had green-lighted a damaging story with absolutely no redeeming social value, a story that had no business being published — the subject was hardly a public figure, a politician, say, known for his anti-gay views —  but because Denton had pulled the plug.

Wrote Read, "That this post was deleted at all is an absolute surrender of Gawker’s claim to radical transparency: that non-editorial business executives were given a vote in the decision to remove it is an unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall, and turns Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company into, essentially, a joke." (Read had previously defended the story by saying that "given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies [expletive] around on their wives." Now there are some inspirational words to add to the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics.)

I'm no fan of taking down stories, even ones this reprehensible. You have to preserve a record. If you do take something down, you need to publish an exceedingly full explanation of why. And I certainly hate to see the business side trampling over editorial decision-making.

But this was a pretty nasty piece of work. And it's odd to generate such a sense of outrage over removing the story while not acknowledging it as the abomination it is. There was no sense the two resigning editors had any second thoughts or sense of remorse.

On the other hand, this is what Gawker does for a living. So you can see Craggs and Read feeling a little blindsided.

Rallying behind unlikely moral causes should be no surprise to Denton. Gawker is grappling with a multimillion-dollar suit wrestler and reality star Hulk Hogan filed after Gawker published a sex tape starring Hogan and Heather Clem, the wife of Hogan's close friend and shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. Denton, searching for support in the media world, has warned that a big verdict against his company  could jeopardize its existence.  Now that would be a truly devastating blow to the future of the republic, if not the entire free world!

As he renounced the story, Denton suggested it would have been fine in an earlier Wild West iteration of the Web. But, he said, the Internet is growing up.

He wrote that "the media environment has changed, our readers have changed, and I have changed. Not only is criticism of yesterday’s piece from readers intense, but much of what they’ve said has resonated. Some of our own writers, proud to work at one of the only independent media companies, are equally appalled.

"I believe this public mood reflects a growing recognition that we all have secrets, and they are not all equally worthy of exposure."

Of course, there is no shortage of skeptics about the notion that Denton has stunningly found religion, er, journalism ethics. Advertisers were threatening to jump ship, and given the threat from the mighty Hulk, that's the last thing Gawker needs.

So, yes, we'll have to see what happens in the future. But for the moment, the head of Gawker standing up against gratuitous cruelty and shoddy journalism is as welcome as it is astonishing.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder

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