Gawker wants your money to pay a drug dealer.

So, yeah. Gawker Media is currently trying to gather $200,000 via crowdsourcing. Why? Because they want to pay drug dealers that allegedly have a video depicting the mayor of Toronto smoking crack.

Yes, Gawker, the parent company of Kotaku, wants to perform "investigative journalism" by giving drug dealers a massive cash pay day using crowdsourced money. Regardless of whether or not Rob Ford actually smoked any crack, the fact that Gawker is actually pursuing this is both disgusting and beyond moronic. Who in the actual fuck would agree to give them money for this?

Yup Gawker, and everything in the Gawker family of sites like Kotaku, is tabloid trash pure and simple. Disgusting.

Haven't they already got $60000? It completely boggles the mind that they would even consider doing this.

I expect way more than any reasonable human being would think.

@hailinel: This guy doesn't seem to think so.

Think some competing sites will make 'outraged' blog posts to milk this story for all the clicks it's worth? Probably.

I'm fairly certain Alex is being sarcastic.

@hailinel:

Ray Muzyka (former Bioware head) and Patrick Klepek retweeted this response blog:

FUCK YOU, GAWKER

Good read.

There must be some legal action that can be taken against them... right?

If they meet that goal I'd be genuinely surprised. I love seeing politicians get busted doing drugs but not enough to pay money for it.

I like this campaign more than the Precursor Games one. And the Penny Arcade one.

Fucking seriously? Gawker has to be doing one or more illegal things here. They're paying drug dealers a bunch of money, publicly, and are slandering Rob Ford by even doing this in the first place. And what's to stop the drug dealers, who may not have the video in the first place, from running off with the cash?

Everything about this is completely and utterly fucked.

Would be funny as hell if its a police sting.

oh, people still get mad at gawker?

they've been a known quantity since even before the iphone scandal. put down the pitchfork, ignore them and move on.

When Gizmodo bought the iPhone, they didn't use crowdsourced money.

@codeacious said:

It's not slander if it's true.

@hunter5024: Yes, but there's no way to know that right now.

they're passing around a hat. as long as it's legal, who cares where people throw their money. i have no personal investment in gawker, rob ford (despite being a former resident of toronto for 8 years), or indiegogo. so again- who cares?

also- the fact that you felt it necessary to say

"Gawker, the parent company of Kotaku"

betrays your motivations and/or bias. what relevance does kotaku and it's editorial team have to rob ford, crack, or ill-advised-crowd-sourcing? guilty by association?

That's not even really investigative journalism. They need a honeytrap and a man in a long cool coat and stuff. Anyway, if people want to throw their money in that direction, that's their business. What would be fun is if they met the goal and then wrote an article on how people are willing to give money to a drug dealer to see a mayor, or any rich fella, be brought down.

why are you trying to be "above" this at all? like hating gawker is old or something. it really isn't an excuse to not condemn them for anything they're doing currently. the more people know about how reprehensible gawker can be the better

@codeacious: True, however in the article they claim they've already seen the video. So that means that it wouldn't be slander provided the video exists, which I'm inclined to believe it does. In fact, and I could be wrong here, if the mayor did start a case claiming slander, then I think it would be within the courts power to order that the video be played for the trial. This is Canada though, so laws might be totally different there.

I think that blog post puts as well as anyone could. This is disgusting and they should be ashamed of themselves, especially if they're justifying it by calling it "journalism"

I don't even know what to say. If they've seen the fucking video, just tell people that. Hell, report it to the police, inform the police who has the video, and done. Don't ask for public money to put money into a violent criminal organization just to out some dumb politician for doing cocaine, just so you can get the exclusive on the story.

I mean, Gawker is already basically already a pool of human waste masquerading as actual people already, but man, this is realllll stupid/fucked up.

fair enough. i'll take my leave from this thread now. i just grow tired of people dismissing massive editorial teams like gawker (do you know HOW MANY WRITERS THEY EMPLOY? some of which are QUITE GOOD!) when tangential (albeit SLEAZY as FUCK) business practices make headlines.

you do realize this would almost be like getting super anti-gamespot when gerstmann-gate went down. that was similarly dodgey-as-hell business practice that was unfairly taken out on many staff. jeff would be the first to remind you of that.

tl;dr- i'm critical of anyone who blanket 'condemns' any media giant. there's always good and bad in a company that's as large and influential as gawker.

I would donate a $1

"For $150: Signed Canadian Flag. Every $150 donor gets a Canadian flag defiled by Gawker owner Nick Denton's signature."

Hahahaha wow

@mellotronrules: i don't think "gawker media" is terrible, i'm referring to gawker.com in my post. i enjoy some deadspin, io9 and kotaku articles now and again but investigative gossip journalism rags as a concept can get kind of gross. gawker strikes me as a more liberal TMZ

You'd buy that for a dollar?

i 100% agree. which is rather than rally the villagers, i just ignore them. but thanks for clearing that up. i mean it's attitudes like this

that i take issue with. everyone's entitled to an opinion- but i start to question myself whenever i catch myself speaking in absolutes.

If you're really interested in exposing corruption in government, a politician doing drugs is so far down at the bottom of the list that it is laughable.

@mellotronrules said:

I sorta agree in that I think the Gawker network engages in this nonsense to fund good, legitimate journalism, which is much more than you can say for most tabloids. Ben Kuchera wrote a pretty good article on the PA report where he talked a bit about that. It could just be my politics betraying me though; I might not be as forgiving if it was one of the big right-wing tabloids doing this kinda thing. Or maybe it's just because I've enjoyed a few too many Jezebel articles.

Well, they've already raised $63,500. Fuck humanity.

What's the problem here? This is just like any freelancer having a story and getting paid for it. Any freelancer could be a drug dealer or user, you don't know. Sure they are asking for the money but like anything if you don't want to support it.........then don't!!

Wow. Just wow.

i'll readily admit to that sort of bias- if people want to have a conversation about fox news, i'll readily admit that i can't take anything they espouse seriously. but at the same time- i don't mind that they exist.

I thought you were bowing out of this thread.

Indeed.

So should I give my money to drug dealers or Denis Dyack? I'm struggling to make a decision here.

I don't see how something being legal means we shouldn't care. It's legal for whole studios to be shut down and laid off, well I guess we shouldn't care then. Why bother talking about it? Legal doesn't mean right and it certainly doesn't mean it isn't completely fucking stupid and shitty. And this situation is the latter for sure.

We will always talk about stupid people doing stupid shit or stupid people doing shitty, stupid shit, or just plain shit happening to regular folks. It's how we advance as a people. People used to tell stories and fables to pass on life lessons and provide examples on how to live or how not to live. Today, we pass around something more potent than stories, reality. And sadly, this is part of our reality.

haha fair enough. but i'd rather be polite and answer questions when people engaging with me than just get my argument rocks off and then exit entirely.

i agree with your initial statement- but i'm not sure how studios being laid off is morally reprehensible. it sucks, but divisions, departments, and whole companies get liquidated all the time. they might have been run irresponsibly, and made poor decisions- but unless they've broken the law, i'm not sure what you would want to do about it. unless you have grounds for prosecution, you're either getting your blood up for no reason, or you're calling for mob rule.

but regarding your second bit- i'm not sure how defaming a media company or website like gawker (whose practices you disagree with) advances us as a society. this is a company or association whose reason for being is to garner attention, good or bad. wouldn't the best possible course of action be to ignore them? that's a death sentence for a company/website like gawker. much moreso than any amount of sabre-rattling in a video game forum.

This is the absolute scummiest thing ever. And the way they are pitching it makes it even scummier. Christ I hope Gawker goes down in flames. Along with all the shitty blogs that it runs.

I never said it was morally reprehensible or worthy or prosecution. I said it was worth caring about and discussing.

I never said the act of defaming a media company advances us as a society. I said the act of sharing and discussing stories does. And you say we should not care about this story, therefore this is not worthy of discussion because it is legal when I think it very much is, irregardless of its legality. It advances us as a people cause it tells us not to give 200000 dollars to fucking drug dealers for a tape of a dude doing drugs.

Well, at least we've established the bottom of the barrel...? No, probably not. This is gross.

I don't particularly enjoy getting on the "Fuck humanity" bandwagon but this shit is pretty disgusting.

I think the only reason people should get mad over this is because of the crowdfunding aspect. The rest of it just falls under shitty journalism practice, which won't be going away anytime soon. Want to fight it? Don't give them the exposure.

I donated to it. This is a good cause because Rob Ford is an asshole and the world needs to know he's a crackhead.

do you honestly feel like it's your responsibility to tell people where to spend their money? and do we actually know they're drug dealers? or is it just presumed because they were smoking crack with rob ford (it's an honest question- has this been confirmed)? i guess i'm wondering what the value of 'discussion' is if there isn't a solution proposed- so far we have gawker doing a nearly universally accepted loathsome thing, and here we have people angry about it. my question would then be- what do you propose we do? raise awareness? that will probably lead to more gawker donors than simply ignoring it. make this sort of thing illegal? well sure, but that seems potentially fraught with ambiguity and unintended consequence.