That's not to say that reporters should be excessively deferential to their subjects' sensibilities. Reasonable people can disagree about whether politicians like Anthony Weiner and anti-gay religious hypocrites deserve to have their private moral failings brought to light (I personally lean toward respecting people's privacy, even when they are monsters), but Gawker's actions in this case served no good purpose. There was no legitimate reason for Gawker writer Jordan Sargent to aid a lunatic conspiracy theorist's quest to blackmail a relatively obscure man, presumably shattering that man's family in the process. It's the near-unanimous opinion of other journalists, some former Gawker employees, and Gawker's own commenters that the story should never have been published in the first place.
Such judgment does not reflect well on Gawker's editorial team. Management voted either 4-2 or 5-1 to yank the story after it was published, according to Executive Editor John Cook, who claimed on Twitter that "I and my colleagues argued as strenuously against as we could, and we lost." We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Today's unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. The (recently unionized) writing staff of the company released the following statement in response: The latest wrinkle in the Conde Nast gay escort controversy is that Gawker publisher Nick Denton has taken down the salacious story-over the furious protests of many Gawker editors.
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