Silicon Valley Needs a Valleywag. Libertarian Billionaire vs Journalism vs Democracy
We're not talking the Koch brothers here. We're talking Paul Thiel and his vendetta against Gawker because he's rich and he can. I find interesting that this story isn't getting more play here. I find it interesting that no one seems to be disturbed that some rich fuck can shut down a media outlet - while others fall over themselves to defend one's right to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Bizarre 
Silicon Valley Needs a Valleywag. Peter Thiel’s misguided, secret war against Gawker Media proves it.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and Facebook board member who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, has plenty of reasons to hate Gawker Media, the company he’s now trying to sue into oblivion by proxy. So do a lot of his peers in the technology industry, who were the chief target of Gawker Media’s now-defunct Silicon Valley–focused gossip site, Valleywag.
Thiel and his friends are not wrong to loathe Valleywag. But they are wrong to think that its caustic brand of muckraking has no value. More importantly, they are wrong to think that using their money and power to silence its parent company, Gawker Media, will solve the problems it presents for them.
On the contrary: Thiel’s previously secret, high-stakes war on Gawker is the strongest possible argument for Valleywag’s existence.
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What Thiel and the Silicon Valley power players who have sided with him get wrong is that Valleywag was never fundamentally about bullying, though it may have seemed so to those who found their names in its headlines. To bully is to push around those weaker than you. Valleywag, with occasional exceptions, saw itself as punching up. Its scoops and gibes were intended not to intimidate but to puncture the valley’s utopian veneer. Its editorial philosophy was about tearing back the masks and capes in which Thiel and other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite tend to cloak themselves. It was about calling out hypocrisy in a realm where it runs rampant. It was about regarding our tech and business overlords with the same skepticism we typically reserve for politicians, because Valleywag’s core insight was that they’re just as powerful (and just as petty and flawed).
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/05/peter_thiel_just_proved_why_silicon_valley_needs_gawker_and_valleywag.html
