Hacker Cinema
Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
2017 · Film · documentary · 95 min
Directed by Brian Knappenberger
The courtroom and publicity battles between the superstar wrestler and the notorious website explode in a sensational trial all about the limits of the First Amendment and the new no holds barred nature of celebrity life in an internet dominated society.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I recently watched the "Hulk Hogan / Gawker" Netflix documentary, "Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press." It was only about the Hulk Hogan / Gawker trial at the beginning, and then it turned into a full-on propaganda piece about how journalism is good and orange man bad. Maybe I am too dumb to have understood, but my takeaway was the morals of the story were basically: (1) it's bad that rich people can influence journalism and that needs to stop and (2) people need to start believing in journalists again because journalists are fundamental to democracy and actually they're very good etc.
I agree with #1 to some extent, but they came up with the dumbest possible example in pointing out that the lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel. I'm pretty sure there's a concept on the "left" that says it's not your right to "out" a person's sexuality. Gawker violated that. Not that I (or even the law) care one way or another, and not that this was the focus of the trial (it wasn't), but I get why Thiel was livid with them. Thiel (secretly) funded a lawsuit against Gawker for posting a sex tape of Hulk Hogan. I'm not even sure what mental backflips you have to do to presume that this was newsworthy or okay. They tried to explain it to us, and the best they got was the meta-point that Thiel funded the lawsuit. Nothing worthy of note about why they had a right (via Freedom of the Press) to make a sex tape public against the wishes of one of the participants. Maybe if it was a sex tape surrounding the impeachment of a current president, I'd understand.
And somehow, I'm supposed to believe that this means there's a slippery slope now, where journalists can no longer freely state the news, for fear of being sued. As if this case weren't limited to the example of, maybe don't post a sex tape of some D-list celebrity as news.
All that said, and per the article here, I am unhappy with "journalists" as a group, specifically with their sanctimonious claims that they're protecting democracy. And the conclusion of this idea, when you take it to the end, is that people simply need to believe them on moral principle, non-believers are against democracy.
They're the victims here, the perpetrators are all the people who don't believe their stories any more--as if there was nothing they did to put themselves in this place.
This is an interesting documentary on this subject.
Nobody Speak: Trials of the free press https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6333064/