#Gawker owner hulk hogan movie
#Gawker owner hulk hogan trial

They only felt thematically linked to me because the people who were tweeting about Gawker were also the ones who tweeted compulsively about the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s problems at the time. That part about Las Vegas Review-Journal did feel jarring, especially since we’d been building the Gawker story up until that point-then, bam, we’re in a completely different narrative. I recently stayed in a hotel room in the Philippines that had one and I had to convince myself that the yellow netting was totally just to keep the mosquitoes away and that canopy beds aren’t good for anything other than sleeping, nope.ĪNYHOW. I’ve never found much joy in canopy beds anyway, but now they make me highly uncomfortable. (Fun fact I remembered while Googling Adelson: The Las Vegas Review-Journal was one of the few newspapers that endorsed Trump.) So even if the relationship between Gawker, Adelson, and the White House is tenuous, it's still important that folks understand these things, and Nobody Speak is good at laying out why they matter.ĭid you feel the same? Was there anything you felt didn't work? Also, have you ever thought of a canopy bed in the same way again after the Hogan sex tape? Do you ever consider what Peter Thiel thinks of your stories?ĭA: Oh, Angela. I did like how Knappenberger used that as a segue to talk about the Trump administration and the president's testy relationship with reporters. Folks who work in the media can see the connection between this and the Gawker case-thanks to Thiel, both involve wealthy and powerful men trying to exert influence over journalism-but I wonder if others would think that section of the film feels out of place, especially if they came to see a documentary about the Hulk Hogan sex tape case. To that end, I think the biggest mental jump I had to make was from the Gawker case to the Adelson bit, which breaks down how the family of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a paper that ostensibly covered the industries he works in. It’s pretty scary that the truth feels malleable these days, rather than the fixed, objective reality that reporters are supposed to expose.

Even tying in Trump, Adelson, and the election-which might have felt unwieldy to an outsider-made sense to me as an idea most of us in the media had latched onto by the end of 2016, and which persists today. Gawker is a complicated beast, but there's little doubt when you're watching this documentary about where Knappenberger stands (read: pretty much a total Gawker cheerleader).

Yes, we know: Gawker pushed past the niceties of traditional mainstream journalism, which led to good and bad things-some articles of seemingly little news value, but also powerful pieces that held public figures and institutions accountable.

#Gawker owner hulk hogan trial

In fact, because this trial was something media reporters had been obsessing about for months on end, all of the points this documentary seemed to want to make were almost overfamiliar to me. Not only did I see themes familiar to me as a journalist, I was also in the uncanny position of seeing onetime colleagues appear in a documentary (full disclosure: I was an intern at Gawker’s tech site, Gizmodo, for six months in 2011). I would actually argue that reporting on the saga may have brought me too close to the action. Davey, you watched this whole thing unfold much more closely than I did was there anything in this doc that really struck you? Moreover, do you think it’ll be as riveting for the average Netflix-surfer as it is for people in our field?ĭavey Alba: As a quick aside, these published conversations have always looked like so much fun from the business desk-I’m glad I have an excuse to do one! But I digress. I hope that people who don’t work in journalism can take something away from this. I am the target audience-I have a vested interest in people understanding attacks on the First Amendment.

#Gawker owner hulk hogan movie

Then again, I work in the very industry Knappenberger’s movie seems dead-set on defending and protecting. Moreover, he’s able to show how the Gawker/Hogan case could have a chilling effect on media in a way I would imagine not everyone really considers. Now, he does it with Gawker’s role in the media in America. He did it with Anonymous in We Are Legion and with Aaron Swartz in The Internet’s Own Boy. Angela Watercutter: As a documentarian, Knappenberger has a knack for showing how individual people and movements can have much wider ramifications.