Growing Gawker Shinks Targets Down to Size

Nick Denton is bristling over New York magazine's new cover story, "Gawker.com and the Culture of Bile." Even before he'd seen the article, the blog mogul (blogul?) posted a riposte on his personal website, implicitly comparing himself to Rupert Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst:

[B]ilious bloggers are hardly the first disrespectful outsiders to bother the media incumbents. Every age has its own cultural panic, in which uncouth interlopers threaten all that is decent and good, and the media establishment, like a stuffy dowager, strikes them from polite society.

The story itself is more a sort of anthropological examination than the knives-out slam job Denton was expecting. The subhed -- "Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass" -- pretty well sums it up. There are some damning details, however, such as this one: "Denton is fond of denying interview requests while secretly helping writers formulate stories about him via off-the-record conversations, then slagging their work later on his blog." Heh.

In the end, what you think about Gawker and like-minded gossip blogs depends largely on how you feel about bile. When it's really about the underclass taking on the overclass, I'm usually all for it. In fact, Gawker provides a much-needed remedy to certain other gossip institutions that often protect the powerful people who least deserve it.

What's insidious is the way the Gawkers of the world have lowered the bar on what constitutes a public figure. Increasingly, it seems anyone who's related to a famous person, or works at a major magazine, or has a lame Facebook profile, is fair game. (Well, anyone except Gawker editors themselves.)

Here's Gawker's Josh Stein justifying his attack on the four-year-old son of writer Neal Pollack: "[W]hen you create a character out of your son, and you develop that character in your prose, that character is open to criticism."

Note the impersonal, passive-voice character of the sentence, the way it shifts the responsibility for the attack from Stein to Pollack. Sure, it's annoying to read about some guy's precocious kid. I bet the post even got a lot of page views. But just because it's possible to rationalize something doesn't make it right.

No one's challenging Josh Stein's constitutional right to earn his living pissing all over the toddlers of marginally famous writers. But every time an Elijah Pollack gets his comeuppance, the Anna Wintours, Jann Wenners and Bonnie Fullers breathe a little easier.