Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/tag/journalism/)
There are some places where the eyes of the press rarely go. Maybe it is because they do not care. Maybe it is because they cannot. Yet this lack of a gaze has left a large blind spot in coverage, which may allow some truly terrible things to continue to happen. The United States has more people in prison than any country in the world.
On August 22nd, Gawker, a blog that had over 800 million page views in the last year, and posted more than 200,000 articles in its lifetime, was destroyed. Some in the media have argued argue that this came about because of Gawker’s own sins and that Gawker’s posting of “non-journalistic” material such as sex tapes and its public outing of powerful people led to its downfall. Yet I believe the truth is much more complicated and sinister. Gawker was destroyed because a billionaire wanted it destroyed. It was destroyed because an avid Trump supporter and tech billionaire decided that the website had done him too much harm and so he bankrolled a number of lawsuits which eventually made the website impossible to operate.