The director of Netflix’s Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker movie wants you to stand up for the press
The day Gawker officially shut down, crippled by a legal battle with Hulk Hogan and billionaire financier Peter Thiel, founder Nick Denton published the site’s final post. In an essay called “How Things Work,” he argued that Gawker‘s death wasn’t a freak accident or an avoidable tragedy, so much as its inevitable fate: “Gawker‘s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.”
The piece carries the tone and tenor of a rising tide of liberal conspiracy theories. In a vacuum, the basic facts of the Gawker story sound like something dredged up from the more unhinged corners of Reddit. The way money, power, and the First Amendment faced off in the 2016 case is almost too cinematic to even function with a…
