When Peter Thiel worked aggressively behind the scenes to put Gawker.com out of business by way of a lawsuit over privacy invasion, there was a lot of talk about the dangers of a billionaire using his limitless resources to suppress a news organization. Democracy dies in darkness, after all, even if it’s as horrible as Gawker.
But I’m not hearing that same concern about Amazon CEO and Washington Post publisher Jeff Bezos in his threatening investigations into the National Enquirer.
Washington Post editorial writer Molly Roberts wrote in January 2018, “No one should want Gawker gone — at least, not this way. Thiel’s secret financing of multiple suits against Gawker was legal. But that shouldn’t erase the squeamishness brought on by a billionaire leveraging his wealth to obliterate a media outlet, all as part of a personal vendetta.”
Some liberals are saying the exact opposite now from what they said just a little more than a year ago.
“I never expected to see Jeff Bezos emerge as a hero of democracy,” New York Times liberal Paul Krugman wrote Friday on Twitter. “But he has. A profile in moral courage.”
Here’s the lead sentence of a Krugman column from April 2018: “Peter Thiel, Facebook investor and Donald Trump supporter, is by all accounts a terrible person.”
What Bezos is doing now to the Enquirer essentially mirrors what Thiel did to Gawker: Seek out punishment for a news operation for publishing embarrassing details about his personal life.
Bezos, right now, has investigators looking into the Enquirer for information on how and why they obtained and published information about his extramarital affair. The report came with explicit photos he had sent privately to his mistress, which I’m inclined to guess are the least searched nude selfies in the history of Google.
The intent of the investigation is to intimidate the Enquirer, or other news outlets who might do something similar. Is there question that it would climax in a lawsuit against the Enquirer?
In 2007, one of Gawker’s sister publications ran a story outing Thiel, an intensely private person, as gay. It was one of countless times that one of Gawker Media’s sites had run a story that delighted in voyeurism and likely wrecked the subject’s personal life.
In 2015, Gawker published a story that outed an executive at Conde Nast. The guy was married and had three children. The apparent source of the story was a male sex worker who had felt slighted by the executive. No one outside of New York and publishing circles had even heard of the executive until Gawker spread his private life all over the Internet.
After severe backlash, Gawker deleted the story.
But it was a legal pursuit against Gawker by Terry Bollea, the former wrestler more widely known as Hulk Hogan, that was eventually funded by Thiel, that ended Gawker for good. In 2012, Gawker published a video that showed Bollea having sex with a woman. Representatives for Bollea requested that Gawker take the video down, but after the website declined, Bollea then sought legal remedies.
He failed multiple times in court, but Thiel, who had been investigating Gawker much like Bezos is now investigating the Enquirer, eventually took up the cause to underwrite further legal action by Bollea. Bollea sued Gawker in court for invasion of privacy and in 2016 was awarded $115 million, plus another $25 million by a Florida jury. It bankrupted the website.
Gawker wasn’t worthless. It did occasionally publish stories of real consequence, though not on the scale of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer, in the late 1980s, published evidence that Gary Hart, a presidential candidate, had been having an affair. The tabloid also ended John Edwards’ 2008 campaign after reporting that he was also having an affair that resulted in a child, all while his wife was dying of cancer.
But the difference between Bezos and Thiel is clear. Thiel was a proud supporter of President Trump. The Enquirer glorified Trump’s 2016 campaign for president and made a practice of protecting Trump from negative stories about his own personal life.
Thiel and the Enquirer, then, are fair targets for criticism, and even investigation, intended put a chill over the tabloid’s work. Bezos, on the other hand, is a hero of the republic.
Admittedly, I’m fine if I never hear about another Bezos “dick pic,” but the people who attacked Thiel and are now defending Bezos won’t get away with pretending their position is about principles. It’s about hating Trump.
