Coverage: PayPal founder Thiel funds litigation against Gawker

The media examined Thursday the disclosure that PayPal founder Peter Thiel — who sits on Facebook’s board — is the one funding wrestler Hulk Hogan’s litigation against news site Gawker.

Rolfe Winkler and Jeffrey Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal gauged reaction in Silicon Valley:

Some Silicon Valley insiders were quick to praise Mr. Thiel after Gawker’s now-defunct tech blog Valleywag for years published often salacious stories.

“Click-bait journalists need to be taught lessons,” said Vinod Khosla, a fellow billionaire venture capitalist, in a tweet on Thursday.

Wesley Chan, managing director at venture-capital firm Felicis Ventures, called Gawker a “pest that would embarrass people for no reason,” and said he agreed with Mr. Thiel “in this one circumstance.” But, he cautioned, “it is a slippery slope” that powerful people might sue journalists for causing even a minor offense.

Others sounded an alarm, worried that the financial firepower provided by outside backers could make it difficult for media companies to reach settlements with those who feel they’ve been wronged. Mr. Thiel’s investment “changes the game for everybody,” said a New York media executive. Gawker CEO Nick Denton “needs a different kind of life preserver because [Peter] Thiel provided an open checkbook.”

Katie Rogers and Michael de la Merced of The New York Times interviewed Denton, who called the move “vindictive”:

Mr. Denton harshly criticized what he said was a lengthy, unnecessary vendetta Mr. Thiel waged against not only Gawker Media but also individual journalists.

“This vindictive decade-long campaign is quite out of proportion to the hurt you claim,” Mr. Denton wrote on Thursday. In the letter, Mr. Denton made it clear that he would not back down against a billionaire who showed no sign of stopping his involvement in underwriting the lawsuits, even as the future of Gawker remained in question.

On Wednesday, Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that he had bankrolled lawsuits against Gawker, including one by the wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea. In March, a Florida jury awarded $140 million to Mr. Bollea in his case against the company for publishing a sex tape. The company is expected to appeal the verdict.

Other lawsuits against Gawker, led by the same lawyer, Charles Harder, representing Mr. Bollea, are still pending.

A spokesman for Mr. Thiel declined to comment on Thursday.

Justin Peters of Slate called Thiel’s actions dangerous to press freedom:

All of this should matter to you, even if you’re neither a tech entrepreneur nor a journalist. Thiel’s newly revealed revenge plot is an epochal wakeup call that should concern everyone. Granted, rich people have tried to counteract and forestall news coverage they dislike for generations, usually by pulling their advertising from the outlets in question, occasionally by purchasing those outlets (calling Sheldon Adelson), and often by suing. But it takes a special kind of vindictiveness to devise a long-term scheme to punish a news outlet, pursue the scheme in secret through the courts, and then appear proud of one’s actions once exposed. Thiel’s lawsuit-funding will have a chilling effect on journalists and journalism, not least by asserting the power of the richest and least accountable among us to define what constitutes acceptable discourse and to punish those who violate these arbitrary standards. That’s something none of us should tolerate.

Reasonable people can disagree on the merit and propriety of Gawker’s practice of writing about the sexualities of powerful people. The problem here is that Thiel has bought the right to decide where that line should fall and who is allowed to cross it.